Every half a millennium or so, waves of change rock Christianity until they cause the kind of earthquake that forces historians to start using capital letters.<\/p>\n\n
\u201cWhat happened before the Great Reformation, we all know,\u201d said Phyllis Tickle, author of \u201cGod Talk in America\u201d and two dozen books on faith and culture. \u201cWe know, for instance, that some sucker sailed west and west and west and didn\u2019t fall off the dad gum thing. That was a serious blow.\u201d<\/p>\n\n
So Columbus sailed the ocean blue in 1492 and then a flat, neatly stacked universe flipped upside down. Soon, people were talking about nation states, the decline of landed gentry, the rise of a middle class and the invention of a printing press with movable type. Toss in a monk named Martin Luther and you\u2019re talking Reformation \u2014 with a big \u201cR\u201d \u2014 followed by a Counter-Reformation.<\/p>\n\n
Back up 500 years to 1054 and you have the Great Schism that separated Rome and from Eastern Orthodoxy. Back up another 500 years or so and you find the Fall of the Roman Empire. The transformative events of the first century A.D. speak for themselves.<\/p>\n\n
Church leaders who can do the math should be looking over their shoulders about now, argued Tickle, speaking to clergy, educators and lay leaders at the recent National Youth Workers Convention in Atlanta. <\/p>\n\n
After all, seismic changes have been rolling through Western culture for a century or more \u2014 from Charles Darwin to the World Wide Web and all points in between. The result is a whirlwind of spiritual trends and blends, with churches splintering into a dizzying variety of networks and affinity groups to create what scholars call the post-denominational age. <\/p>\n\n
Tickle is ready to call this the \u201cGreat Emergence,\u201d with a tip of her hat to the edgy flocks in the postmodern \u201cemerging church movement.\u201d<\/p>\n\n
\u201cEmerging or emergent Christianity is the new form of Christianity that will serve the whole of the Great Emergence in the same way that Protestantism served the Great Reformation,\u201d she said, in a speech that mixed doses of academic content with the wit of a proud Episcopalian from the deeply Southern culture of Western Tennessee.<\/p>\n\n
However, anyone who studies history knows that the birth of something new doesn\u2019t mean the death of older forms of faith. The Vatican didn\u2019t disappear after the Protestant Reformation.<\/p>\n\n
This kind of revolution, said Tickle, doesn\u2019t mean \u201cany one of those forms of earlier Christianity ever ceases to be. It simply means that every time we have one of these great upheavals \u2026 whatever was the dominant form of Christianity loses its pride of place and gives way to something new. What\u2019s giving way, right now, is Protestantism as you and I have always known it.\u201d<\/p>\n\n
It helps to think of dividing American Christianity, she said, into four basic streams \u2014 liturgical, Evangelical, Pentecostal-charismatic and old, mainline Protestant. The problem, of course, is that there are now charismatic Episcopalians and Catholics, as well as plenty of Evangelicals who are interested in liturgical worship and social justice. Conservative megachurches are being forced to compromise because of sobering changes in marriage and family life, while many progressive flocks are being blasted apart by conflicts over the same issues.<\/p>\n\n
In other words, the lines are blurring between once distinct approaches to faith. Tickle is convinced that 60 percent of American Christians are worshipping in pews that have, to one degree or another, been touched by what is happening in all four camps. At the same time, each of the quadrants includes churches \u2014 perhaps 40 percent of this picture \u2014 that are determined to defend their unique traditions no matter what.<\/p>\n\n
The truly \u201cemerging churches\u201d are the ones that are opening their doors at the heart of this changing matrix, she said. Their leaders are determined not to be sucked into what they call \u201cinherited church\u201d life and the institutional ties that bind. They are willing to shed dogma and rethink doctrine, in an attempt to tell the Christian story in a new way.<\/p>\n\n
\u201cThese emergent folks are enthusiastically steering toward the middle and embracing the whole post-denominational world,\u201d said Tickle. \u201cWe could end up with something like a new form of Pan-Protestantism. \u2026 It\u2019s all kind of exciting and scary at the same time, but we can take some comfort in knowing that Christianity has been through this before.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Every half a millennium or so, waves of change rock Christianity until they cause the kind of earthquake that forces historians to start using capital letters. \u201cWhat happened before the Great Reformation, we all know,\u201d said Phyllis Tickle, author of \u201cGod Talk in America\u201d and two dozen books on faith and culture. \u201cWe know, for […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":610,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[319,341,513,543,693,714,863],"class_list":["post-1466","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-emerging-churches","tag-evangelicalism","tag-liturgical-worship","tag-megachurches","tag-protestantism","tag-reformation","tag-tickle"],"yoast_head":"\n