Product Description

Rooted in the observation that massive transitions in the church happen about every 500 years, Phyllis Tickle shows readers that we live in such a time right now. She compares the Great Emergence to other "Greats" in the history of Christianity, including the Great Transformation (when God walked among us), the time of Gregory the Great, the Great Schism, and the Great Reformation. Combining history, a look at the causes of social upheaval, and current events, The Great Emergence shows readers what the Great Emergence in church and culture is, how it came to be, and where it is going. Anyone who is interested in the future of the church in America, no matter what their personal affiliation, will find this book a fascinating exploration.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #6965 in Books
• Published on: 2008-10-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 176 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780801013133
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. North American Christianity is presently undergoing a change every bit as radical as the Protestant Reformation, possibly even as monumental as its natal break with Judaism. And it's right on schedule. Tickle, author of God-Talk in America and PW's founding religion editor, observes that Christianity is holding its semimillennial rummage sale of ideas. With an elegance of argument and economy of description, Tickle escorts readers through the centuries of church history leading to this moment and persuasively charts the character of and possibilities for the emerging church. Don't let this book's brevity fool you. It is packed with keen insights about what this great emergence is, how it came to be and where it may be headed. Tickle issues a clear call to acknowledge the inevitability of change, discern the church's new shape and participate responsibly in the transformation. Although Tickle's particular focus excludes the dynamic forces of Asian, African and Central/South American Christianity, this is a must-read for anyone seeking to understand the face and future of Christianity. (Oct.)
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From Booklist
*Starred Review* Long an astute observer of religion, Tickle examines a phenomenon she refers to as the Great Emergence, a once-every-500-years trend within Christianity, in which a new and “more vital” form of the religion emerges. She believes such a development is happening now. To make her case, she examines the complex history of Christianity from Copernicus’ heretical idea that the earth circled the sun to the sixteenth-century Great Reformation to the Catholic Counter-Reformation. She also examines the effect on religion of great nineteenth- and twentieth-century cultural and social upheavals including those wrought by Darwin’s Origin of Species; Faraday’s field theory, which became foundational for the technology we all take for granted today; and the theories of Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Albert Einstein, and Joseph Campbell. She explores the impact that the rise of the automobile has on Christian worship and church service while also making brief forays into the origins of Pentecostalism, the influence of Karl Marx, Buddhism, Alcoholics Anonymous, recreational drug use, and the changing roles of women and, hence, the notion of the traditional family, in society since World War II. Somehow all these diverse strands come together in a seamless fabric that, at fewer than 200 pages, is small but full of big ideas, a remarkable achievement of synthesis and thoughtful reflections. --June Sawyers

From the Inside Flap
"The Great Emergence offers a sweeping overview of church history and locates us in a moment of great opportunity and challenge. To some, this analysis will come as a rude awakening, and to others, as a dream coming true. My hunch is that this will be one of the most important books of the year, and will shape the conversation among a wide range of Christians for years to come."--Brian McLaren, author/activist "Without exaggeration, I say this book is a masterwork, and it will be cited for decades to come as the most pointed articulation of the church and Christianity that is emerging from the compost of Christendom. I don't know which I admire more: Tickle's erudition, her brilliant writing, or her faithfulness."--Tony Jones, national coordinator, Emergent Village; author, The New Christians As an internationally renowned expert on religion, Phyllis Tickle has incisive perspective on the trends and transformations of our time. Here, she invites us into a conversation as she shares her reflections stemming from not only personal faith but also decades of observation and analysis. The result is a work that meets the challenge of chronicling a pivotal time in the church's history so we might better understand where we have been and what the future holds. Tickle clearly lays out the gradual steps leading up to this transformation, including the influences and effects of Darwin, Freud, Einstein, the automobile, and technological advances. She then sets her sights on where we're going, leaving us with a vision of an exciting future for the Church.

Customer Reviews

Flawed, but informative
Phyllis Tickle's newest book, The Great Emergence: How Christianity Is Changing and Why, arrived yesterday. At 172 pages, this small but elegant volume (aren't all Tickle's books elegant?) both informs and disappoints. Tickle takes on the daunting task of reviewing the major turning points or `Great' events in the life of the Christian church. Her contention is that every 500 years or so the church goes through a `great' transformation.

Counting back from the present, the Great Reformation took place about 500 years ago -- 1517 to be exact. Prior to that, The Great Schism occurred when the Eastern and Western churches split over icons and statues. Five hundred years earlier, Gregory the Great blessed and encouraged the monastic orders which would preserve the Christian faith through the Dark Ages. Of course, 500 years before that, we're back in the first century and the time of the apostles. Today, Tickle contends, the church in in the throes of The Great Emergence.

But, the Great Emergence is not just religious. It is also cultural, technological, and sociological. Of course, context shaped each of the other `great' church transformations as well, and this time is no different. Tickle takes the reader on an overflight of church history, world events, and charts the shifts in the center of authority in the life of the church. In the Great Reformation, of course, the cry of authority was sola scriptura - only scripture. Tickle traces the diminution of the authoritative place of scripture in culture and Christianity from its heady beginnings in the Reformation to its marginalization in the current postmodern era. The book provides thoughtful tracing of influential elements as Tickle leads the reader on a quest for a center of authority.

But, while Tickle's insights and examples provide clues to the transformative forces in our culture and society, the book disappoints when we arrive at the present. Tickle sees all denominations, all churches, all movements in the quadrant of Christianity -- conservative, liturgical, renewalist, and social justice -- as converging toward the center. Granted, there are those denominations and groups that cling to their identities in a kind of resistant pushback, but Tickle's vision is that we are all being swept up into the next great moment of the church -- The Great Emergence. Every church, not just the cool emerging church types, are part of The Great Emergence. I'm not sure that is happening, but I could have lived with Tickle's opinion except for some examples she uses.

Tickle uses John Wimber and the Vineyard churches as an example of this new kind of emergence. She correctly credits Quakers -- Richard Foster, Parker Palmer, etc -- with great influence on the spirituality of the Great Emergence. I might add Elton Trueblood to that list, as mentor to Foster, but Tickle doesn't. But, in her citing of John Wimber, she goes off track. She credits Wimber with being a "founder" of the Church Growth department at Fuller, and calls Peter Wagner his colleague. I was present at Fuller during Wagner's tenure, and I was enrolled in the DMin program in church growth. I attended one of the Signs and Wonders classes, heard Wimber speak, and got a sense of his idea of `power evangelism.'

Wimber was not a founder of the church growth movement. He was an adjunct faculty member at Fuller. Dr. Donald McGavran was the founder, Peter Wagner was his protege. I met McGavran once, although he had retired when I was enrolled at Fuller. Tickle misunderstands Wimber's approach, and also overestimates the Quaker influence on Wimber. Wimber left the traditional church in which he had become a Christian because he wanted to `do the stuff' -- heal the sick, raise the dead, cast out demons, and so on. I also attended the Vineyard church that Wimber headed, and it was no Quaker meeting. So, at the end of the book, Tickle disappoints. Simple fact-checking could have offered a corrective to her inclusion of Wimber.

While Wimber did create a powerful new church community called Vineyard, he used signs and wonders as power evangelism to win people to Christ. All of that was very much part of the church growth movement that believed in attractional evangelism. Wimber's brand just happened to be one of the more interesting versions of church growth techniques being used to gather people. She also wrongly attributes the concept of bounded sets and centered sets to Wimber when actually it was Paul Hiebert, the missiologist, who used those concepts to illustrate new approaches to understanding the place of persons in the Kingdom of God.

Would I recommend the book? A qualified yes is in order here. The book succeeds in all but the last chapter. If you want a great overview of where Christianity has been, what the influences were that got it there, and where it might be headed, Tickle's book provides a good, concise overview. My disappointment was that it fails to see clearly the way forward, and misinterprets some of the church's most recent experiements, such as Vineyard. But, Tickle is an elegant writer, and the book is a valuable resource to those aware of its short-comings.

Why buy another Phyllis Tickle book? Because this one is a concise overview of her work, great for groups.
If you know the name "Phyllis Tickle," then you probably already own one or more of her books. You may own copies of her guides to recovering the tradition of fixed-hour prayer, such as "Christmastide: Prayers for Advent Through Epiphany from The Divine Hours" or "The Divine Hours: Prayers for Springtime (Tickle, Phyllis)." You may be a fan of her "Prayer Is a Place" or may have studied her "The Words of Jesus: A Gospel of the Sayings of Our Lord with Reflections by Phyllis Tickle" with a small group.

So, why buy another Tickle book?

The answer is that this short volume is conceived as really a summation and introduction to the vast sweep of Phyllis' work over the past decade. You'll find here her concise overview of 500-year cycles of religious change. You'll find here her system for sorting out the impact of various religious movements -- and the convergence of movements back toward a spiritual core in Christianity.

For a small book, though, this text deals with very big issues. While primarily a Christian book, there are important insights here for anyone interested in changing global culture and values.

This book is custom-made for small-group study.

Good food for thought
This is a book that was fascinating to me. So much of it was of strong interest, and it is so well researched and packed with complex analysis and theory, that I chose to read it a 2nd time for deeper understanding, and parts of it a third time!

The Great Emergence is a good summary of some of the broad strokes of Christian history, in the context of wider societal and technological change. It is a helpful summary of some of the trends in the last ½ century of the American Church. I do feel there are areas of lack of clarity and some speculation in analysis that I don't agree with fully, or question. With all that, still, I am somewhat reluctant to be critical because there is so much of value in the book. But...

Before going there, however, I want to encourage everyone to read the book. It is an important one for every kind of Christian, especially those who are reform-minded or concerned about developments in church and culture. It is not an easy read, and it will stretch your vocabulary (a good thing in my "book").

One of the more significant flaws I feel the book has is this: I could never quite get clear on just who Tickle mainly had in mind as part of the emergence. At times, it seems she is referring to virtually all Christians who are seeking new forms of Christian expression and/or belief, but at others, particularly in the last chapter, she does seem to narrow participants in the Great Emergence to those labeled either "emerging" or "emergent" specifically. This would be a much smaller set of people than she, at other places, seems to include as emerging (but without such a label put on either by themselves or others). So the apparently dual use of the terms, without explanation that I could find, made for some confusion.

Similarly, I could not get clear on what she means by the "gathering center." It is certainly not a conceptual thing in her description, other than broadly Christian, as much as it involves values/style/orientation to authority and culture. Given who all she seems to include as part of that center, it seems the only thing these Christians all share is interest in and/or action toward a different approach than all that has gone before, as to Christian community and expression. But that would be true of individuals and groups in any part of her quadrant or later modified diagrams. She goes into detail about various reforms and the various "locations" (in relation to her diagrams) of Christian groups and orientations. But still, just how she means "center" seems to elude me.

I'd also like the book to give deeper answers, or at least probe deeper on how emerging Christians DO deal with questions of authority. She brings up repeatedly the need among emerging Christians (seemingly in the broadest sense of emerging) to find what constitutes authority. Yes, it may be in a lot of flux, but I tend to think more can be identified and explained about some coalescing new concepts of authority, beyond her few comments near the end that it is in some combination of Scripture and community.

There are two final areas I'll comment on in which I felt Tickle left out things of significance that would have helped fill out the picture she was trying to paint. One is the issue of consciousness studies and how they specifically impact this emergence, this change in worldviews; and specifically impact cosmology of life and the soul/spirit. In fact, cosmology, whether of the physical universe or of spiritual beingness, was little touched on. One might appropriately let this slide except that this IS a big-picture book, and it seems fitting to go to the things that are the biggest of all.

Directly related to this, she did comment very briefly a couple times on the phenomenon of being "spiritual but not religious," but seemed to connect it primarily with alienated Christians. People like Robert Fuller, in a book with that phrase as title, find data to indicate that is a self-designation or fair description for 15-20% of Americans. Only a portion of them, perhaps even a minority, consider themselves to have ever been Christian.

A similar oversight is having almost no discussion of how broad "New Age" concepts, Buddhism and other Eastern thought have indirectly, if not directly, impacted Christianity, and continue to, toward reform and a willingness to seek common ground spiritually with those outside specifically Christian categories and practices. In all these sources, as well as a sizable and growing group of religiously open scientists (including medical professionals and social scientists) who are often neither New Age/Eastern nor Christians, there is a particular, intense focus on learning about the nature of consciousness. I think Tickle may incorporate this under what she refers to as considering what it means to be human, but again it's just thrown out with little elaboration.

The final omission (or under-coverage) I'll mention is making only passing references to re-formation of doctrine/theology specifically. Only at the end does she merely mention the "...coming conflict between traditional Christian and emergence theology..." (p. 161). She does touch on a few of the aspects of what that does and will involve, but only ever-so-briefly. I realize her aim was an overview, but it did lead to the impression, for me, that she might not realize just how crucial a role theological understandings and formulations will continue to be.

I've done a relatively small amount of reading of noted "Emergents" (her "orthonomy" oriented members within the larger grouping of them and "emergings," who are more "theonomy" focused). In that reading, along with material about them and the movement, my sense is that their underpinnings of authority and of specific theology are actually distinctly NOT Evangelical in any typical sense (while perhaps Dan Kimball and others as "emerging" ARE). However, many Emergent leaders seem to be reluctant to be cut off, or perceived as cut off from Evangelicalism. (Similarly, theological radicals like Pinnock or social/political ones like Campolo seem to want to stay "in the fold," even when threatened with banning, shunning, or pressure to conform.)

The Emergents have no other "home" or mooring point and seem to resist getting into the position of starting a new sect or distinct "movement," not attached at least loosely to conservative Protestant Christianity (or whatever Tickle's "center" is, which she herself says originated primarily within the quadrant she labels "conservative"). I'd have loved to have seen Tickle jump into and discuss this issue in some depth.... Maybe some of you will do so, I hope.

A final point on theological underpinnings. Here I will speak primarily in relation to Brian McLaren, whose thinking I know better than other Emergent or emerging Christians, having read a few of his books, heard him speak and interact in a group setting, etc. He does seem to be perhaps the theologically most informed and sophisticated of the main leaders of both "wings" of the emerging movement. In what I have read of his work, plus a smattering here and there of related authors, I have not found what I think would be logical, suitable, and important: a serious look into what is sometimes called "the myth of beginnings" of Christianity.

It is somewhat related to and overlapping with the "quest for the historical Jesus," which Tickle does speak about some. But in some regards, it is foundational to that very quest, and thus at least as important, perhaps more so in that the historical Jesus research itself has gone about as far as is productive, for now. It is also foundational to the points of emphasis of McLaren and others about the nature of the Kingdom and the core message and ethos of Jesus.

I realize this may not be clear or meaningful to some readers and I can't take the space here to go into it other than to say that a good segment of biblical scholarship for a couple decades at least, has properly broadened its pursuits in an interdisciplinary manner, into probing for better understandings of the nature and formative, growth processes of the earliest groups of Jesus followers and how they ultimately became Jewish Christian groups, or started as mixed Jewish/Gentile groups (as via Paul, et al). The entire picture of what has guided Christian development theologically, and elements of the foundational assumptions orthodoxy still operates from, tends to be radically modified when an historically, sociologically, literarily focused study is made of what is often called "Christian origins." If nothing else is, this is germane, in a vital way, to The Great Emergence. It's time for both scholars and lay people to stop sticking their heads in the sand in relation to it. Tickle seems to have set things up to discuss it, but then missed the grand opportunity, perhaps out of ignorance regarding it.