Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Phyllis Tickle (1934–2015) was an authority on religion in America and a much sought after lecturer on the subject. Founding editor of the Religion Department of Publishers Weekly, she has been frequently quoted by media sources including USA Today, Christian Science Monitor, the New York Times, PBS, NPR, the Hallmark Channel, plus innumerable blogs and websites. In addition to lectures and numerous essays, articles, and interviews, Tickle is the author of over two dozen books in religion and spirituality, including The Great Emergence, How Christianity is Changing and Why, and The Words of Jesus, A Gospel of the Sayings of Our Lord.

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EMBRACING EMERGENCE CHRISTIANITY

Seabury Books

Contents

Quick Guide to the Handbook...................................4Beyond the "Quick Guide"......................................5Pointers on Facilitation......................................9Session 1: Emergence 101......................................11Session 2: Where Now Is Our Authority?........................27Session 3: The 20th Century and Emergence.....................41Session 4: Gifts from Other Times.............................59Session 5: How Then Shall We Live?............................71Session 6: Hallmarks of Emergence.............................85

Chapter One

ESSAY ONE BY PHYLLIS TICKLE

1. Most discussions, to be of any use to us at all, have to begin with some kind of common vocabulary or mutually-understood definitions. This discussion is certainly no different; and we must start with at least a few terms that are central to our over-all subject of Emergence Christianity.

2. Emergence Christianity is a global phenomenon, present in parts of both hemispheres and on every continent. In point of fact, as an operative and highly visible part of Christian expression, Emergence came last to the North American continent. Session One is going to refer to Emergence Christianity, then, as present in the latinized world, a term that is much more accurate and far less offensive than others like Western World or First World. Latinized refers to the cultures and countries who received Christianity through the Latin, as opposed to the Syriac or Greek language, or were colonized by those who had so received the faith, or were colonialized by those who had so received it.

3. The word emergence that keeps appearing everywhere these days originally had a far more focused and specific meaning than it presently enjoys in popular conversation. That is, Emergence (or Emergence Theory, to give it its full name) is a principle of the natural sciences. It studies and describes the non-hierarchal ways in which living creatures and their societies organize themselves, describing phenomena like the difference between a beehive and an anthill; the former is ruled by its queen and the latter by a communal operation in which no one is in charge and within which a queen is of use only as a breeder of more ants.

4. Wherever Emergence appears in nature, it always also involves a shift toward increased complexity. In fact, Emergence Theory as such was first discovered and formulated in the latter part of the 19th century in an attempt to understand why Darwin's principles of survival of the fittest and natural selection did not explain phenomena like human consciousness, let alone anthills. It is, then, the leap to an increased complexity, greater than that which could have been predicted from an organism's constituent parts, named both in the science lab and in sociology. The use of the term to name the huge lurch forward in complexity that characterizes both our times and the Church living and operating within them is, in other words, both a logical and a very informing choice, once we understand its history.

5. Emergence Christianity, while it names a new, more complex, and non-hierarchal form of Christianity, is not a monolith, any more than was the Protestantism that preceded it or the Roman Catholicism that preceded them both, or the monastic and episcopal Christianity that preceded all three of them. No one ever thought that all presentations of Protestantism are the same, one with another. We recognize Lutherans as being distinct from Presbyterians and both of them as distinct from Methodists, even though we are equally comfortable calling each of them "Protestants." That is, we recognize their separateness while at the same time recognizing their shared sensibilities and defining principles.

6. In the exact same way, Emergence Christianity is frequently referred to as a conversation. That generalized, nonspecific definition is a way of saying that, though there are several distinct expressions of Emergence, they nonetheless hold in common certain principles and characteristics. For the purposes of our discussion, then, we must recognize that there are emerging expressions of Emergence and there are emergent ones, missional expressions and neo-monastic ones. There is deep church and Fresh Expressions of Church. There are house churches and even cyber churches. There are also the hyphenateds—those who have Emergence DNA deeply rooted in them, but who yet wish to retain the corpus of their natal tradition. They originally referred to themselves as Presby-mergents or Luther-mergents or Metho-mergents or Angli-mergents, thus gaining for themselves their unusual name. Now the hyphens have more or less disappeared, and the words appear un-hyphenated as Presbymergents or Luthermergents, Methomergents, or Anglimergents, the hyphen living on now more in memory than in print. There are also responses to Emergence Christianity like today's neo-Calvinism and accommodations to it like Alt Worship.

7. Session One presents the great upheavals that have occurred in Latinized Christian culture and Christianity. It will outline as well the periods—or progression of periods—that are internal to each of those turnings. In general and with a variance of no more than a decade or two, each of the 'Greats' follows this internal pattern.

8. First, there is that moment in which the new way of thinking and being seems, almost abruptly, to have arrived at last as the operative and dominant part of the general and public conversation about the way things are. Thus we refer to the Great Reformation as having begun on October 31, 1517, even though we know quite well that there were years and decades of events that led up to Luther and his 95 Theses. In the same way, observers seem content now to think that the Great Emergence will be dated in history from the events of 9/11. Whether that be true or not, we can safely say that there is that defining moment when we recognize we have shifted into a "new" world.

9. Shortly after we recognize that the ground has seriously shifted beneath us and a new day has dawned, we realize as well that those changes and shifts have been creeping up on us for a very long time. Actually, they have been more or less roaring up on us for about a hundred and fifty years. That period of 150 years is called by its colloquial name of tick-up, or in a much more dignified way, as the peri- as in the peri-Reformation or the peri-Emergence.

10. What that hundred and fifty years of peri-that precedes each upheaval does is simply to chip away, slowly but inevitably, at the bases of authority that had accrued since the last upheaval and had given stability to both the Church and the culture in which it functions. As a result, the first century or so after our recognition of a dramatic and pervasive new way of being is spent trying to answer a very fundamental...