Book Review: The Great Emergence

Tickle’s
The Great Emergence is a captivating look at how the Western
church is shifting and the possibilities of change and division that
are bubbling on the surface of turbulent times within various
denominations, movements, and traditions.

Tickle’s thesis is that the
"great " church changes profoundly every 500 years, the first
change happening with Pope Gregory the Great in the 500-600 AD time
frame, the Great Schism happening around 1000 AD, the Reformation
happening around 1500 AD, and the Great Emergence, a current and
coming time when the fragmentation of Western Christianity will
implode back onto itself and become an "emerging, a-borning center
which will be the next to hold pride of place in Church history"
(141).

Tickle
presents her thesis in a fast flying flurry of ideas and concepts
that make sense in their premise, but with the pace moving so quickly
not many of the ideas are fleshed out. The main criticism with the
book I have is that there is not enough time spent on the broad
historical and theological theories Tickle presents in the first two
parts of the book. With such a broad palatte the book has the
feeling of The DaVinci Code with names, dates, ideas, and
historical vignettes flying about. In a criticism not often given to
books coming out of the Christian publishing industry, I simply
believe that the book should have been much longer in the first two
parts to allow Tickle to flesh out her foundational thesis in much
more detail.

The
value of the book is when Tickle dons the hat of the futurist and
presents her understanding of the changes coming to Christianity
within the next several decades. Whereas Yeats famously wrote in his
poem, "The Second Coming": "Turning and turning in the widening
gyre/The falcon cannot hear the falconer;/Things fall apart; the
centre cannot hold," Tickle herself believes that the center will
hold, and the widening gyre of denominations, traditions, and
movements will begin to collapse back upon herself. Things will fall
apart, but it will be on the margins, not within the center.

The
center of the Great Emergence is along the lines of what John Wimber
termed "center-set movement," a re-orientation of practical
theology that sees the spiritual journey of a person toward Christ
not in the traditional mode of "believe-behave-belong" but
instead now as "belong-behave-believe."

As
the author notes, the significant thing here is that the Great
Emergence is shaping a theology that will be the theology, in part,
of society’s reconfigured understanding of the self, the soul, the
humanness of being in imago dei. It will impact everything
from medical policy to moral theory as well as evangelism and
religious formation.

Whether
we are truly on that path remains to be seen, but Tickle nonetheless
makes a convincing argument that the future may be one of great
emergence.

——
The Great Emergence: How Christianity is Changing and Why
Phyllis Tickle
BakerBooks