Phyllis Tickle’s The Great Emergence is a deceptively short and easy-to-read breakdown of the current state of North American Christianity.  Tickle’s senior citizenship and long time experience as religion editor for Publisher’s Weekly, allows her to levitate above the fray of the modern-hyper-calvinists vs. the pomo-emergents.  Her thesis is that every 500 years, Christianity has a garage sale, and we’re in the middle of one right now.

The bulk of the book shows how the basis of American Protestantism, primarily concepts like sola scriptura and the nuclear family, have been broken down a “century of emergence.” 

The most valuable material comes at the end, where she creates a visual respresentation of American Christianity, divided into four quadrants: Liturgicals, Social Justice Christians, Conservatives and Renewalists.  “The Great Emergence” is what’s happening in the center, where divisions are breaking down.  She includes the explosion of charismatic movements and the vanilla-evangelical megachurches as the forerunners of a newly emerging Christianity.  Now Pentecostals are using liturgy, Social Justice people are rediscovering personal morality, evangelicals are passionate about clean water in Africa, etc. 

Emergence left me with the following question: If post-modernism, globalism and technology have redefined what it means to be human how must we redefine what it means to be the church?