Phyllis Tickle spoke at the general session the second day of YS. She gave us a brief survey in church history of what she called “rummage sales,” that is those times of major upheaval in the church, usually when something huge in the prevailing culture challenges the church’s assumptions about reality, etc. It seems that these major upheavals happen every 500 years or so. In 70 AD there was the fall of the temple when Christianity became seen as more than just a sect of Judiasm, then there was the decline of Rome between the 400’s and the 500’s, next there was the Great Schism in 1054 between the East and the West in the church dividing Christianity between Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox. Next would come the Protestant Reformation beginning in 1517 with Martin Luther.

Tickle explained that we are in the beginning stages of one of these great upheavals right now, one she called “The Great Emergence.” Of course she was talking about the shift in our culture from the modern to the postmodern and the church’s response, largely seen in movements like the emerging church. YS is such a diverse gathering, not lacking in anti-emergent types, so when it became obvious where she was going with this I was delighted. Tickle has such a great gift of communication and I was glad to have her explain the emerging church to a crowd that would be full of both full-on emergents and anti-emergents alike. She briefly explained that technology has made our world much smaller, giving us access to so much more of the world than we had during the previous 500 years. Christians are much more aware of (and appreciate) the rest of Christianity in ways they didn’t before. To illustrate this Tickle drew us a diagram which I’ve tried to recreate here.

In the top left quadrant are the Liturgical Christians (Catholic, Orthodox, Anglican, etc.) who are starting to look more and more alike in the current landscape of Christianity. In the top right quadrant are the Social Justice Christians (a lot of our mainline churches fall into this category – Presbyterian, Methodist, Christian Church, etc.) and though they come from different theological streams they are beginning to look very similar to one another in the current Christian landscape. In the bottom left are the Renewalists (she equated them with the Pentecostals) and the bottom right are the Evangelicals. I think she tried to give each group a new name to emphasize that these quadrants are not necessarily descriptive of entire denominations, that is, these days you can find fairly Evangelical Presbyterian churches (I work at one, I should know!) or Liturgical Nazarene churches (again, I’ve been in a few of those). Her point was, the landscape is changing and we are becoming more aware of the other quadrants. Not just more aware, but many of us are finding those other quadrants to not only be entirely compatible with our own, but attractive and beautiful.

To boil it down even more…

Nazarenes are discovering the liturgy and they’re falling in love with it.

Presbyterians are starting to talk about Jesus and having a personal relationship with God.

Pentecostals are buying compact-fluorescent light bulbs and building houses for the poor.

and on and on.

The purple circle are those who are somewhere inbetween in this whole emerging church thing, they’re emergent but they’re not giving up on their particular tradition (the Presbymergents, Emergent Nazarenes, etc.). This is where I find myself.

This phenomenon of blurring the distinctions between one narrow stream of Christianity and another, the borrowing of someone else’s tradition’s gifts and using them as if they belong to the whole church… that describes what’s happening in the Emerging Church. In some ways it’s a (re)discovery of some of the gifts within our Christian faith that we’ve separated ourselves from over the past few hundred years. Denominations are becoming less important. And I pray to God, that the glue that holds this whole Emerging Church thing together is Jesus Christ. At the center of this diagram, the Emerging Church is an experiment of what it might look like to do church as if the denominational boundaries aren’t what hold us together, but Jesus is.

And here’s where the corners of each quadrant are so important. The corners are the reactionary anti-emergent voice within each tradition. They keep us from from falling off the face of the map into “unity for the sake of unity”-ism. Their critique’s may seem harsh and inflexible, and they may call us heretics for embracing (or at least appreciating) what another stream of Christianity has to offer… but they are our roots, that’s where we come from and it’s important to remember where you come from. The hardliners will help the emerging church to articulate its faith by challenging it so much.

Tickle gave a warning and a charge at the end of her talk saying, every time there has been one of these church upheavals Christians have deionized each other and resorted to violence in their disagreements. This time we need to remember that there are Christians all over that map, our tradition does not “own” the only true expression of the Christian faith. We would do well to work out the tumultuous future of our faith with humility and peaceableness.