Book Review: The Great Emergence by Phyllis Tickle

I have a somewhat conservative religious background. My church growing up was an independent Baptist church that was very fundamental. I attended Biola University for my college studies, a relatively conservative college. And even now I attend First Baptist Church of Palmdale I pretty traditional Baptist church. When I was younger, due to my parents, family, school and church I was a pretty right wing conservative little bugger. Slowly I have moved more and more away from my roots. Such as, I now oppose the death penalty across the board, I believe that rehabilitation is much better option then incarceration, and other things. I guess I didn’t know it, but I have slowly moving towards the center of life and I find that I am now what you consider an emerging Christian. Had you asked a few months ago what that meant I probably would have had to cobble together an answer from what little I knew, but now after reading Phyllis Tickle’s new book I understand more where I am from and where I am going.

Phyllis Tickle is not a trained Theologian, but in her role as one of the founders of the Religion department of Publisher’s Weekly she has had a unique position to see how Christianity and in particular writing about Christianity has shaped and evolved over recent years. Tickle recognizes that now, as has happened in the past approximately every 500 years, the church goes though a big change, and we are currently in the midst of one such change, which she has been coined the Great Emergence.

In the book Tickle examines the idea of the church having a major change every 500 years or so. She presents the work of Pope Gregory I around the late 500’s who being the first Pope from a Monastic background, placed much church authority in monasteries. Then she reminds us of the Great Schism which happened around 500 years later and saw the separation of East and West in the Church. Thirdly Tickle presents the Great Reformation which happened another 500 years later and separated the catholic church from the protestant church. Now the author suppose we are coming into a Great Emergence. The next major change in the Christian Church.

I found the details of the previous three to be interesting but a bit lacking. I would of liked to of learned more, but I suppose they were just to provide a background for what she had to say about the current emergence.

As far as the great emergence, Tickle focuses mainly on North American Christianity and presents it as coming to center of the church, and moving away from solo scriptura. Her work unfortunately is brief and does not cover or go into detail as much as I would like. She doesn’t really delve too much into the purpose of the emergence or the goal of the emergence, but I suppose she much like the rest of us don’t know.

This book is more about taking a step back, seeing that things like this have happened before and are obviously happening now. Many complain that she is too vague, but I can’t blame her, she is just telling us that something is going on and we shouldn’t be afraid and here is a little of what to expect. It is not a work full of theological details or scripture references. But more then anything a work of Church History and Church Future. As I have said before I would of loved more detail, but I believe time will fill in those details on it’s own.