A Voice in the Wilderness: Reflections on Phyllis Tickle’s The Great Emergence and Its Implications for the Episcopal Church of Tomorrow

“No one sews a piece of unshrunk cloth on an old cloak, for the patch pulls away from the cloak, and a worse tear is made. Neither is new wine put into old wineskins; otherwise, the skins burst, and the wine is spilled, and the skins are destroyed; but new wine is put into fresh wineskins, and so both are preserved.” 

Matthew 9:16-17

On the cover of Phyllis Tickle’s The Great Emergence is a single portrait composed from four artistically distinct representations of Christ. By stitching together several different images, a new eclectic picture emerges, and in essence, the cover of Tickle’s work closely mirrors the book’s central argument of how the face of modern day Christianity is once again undergoing a semi-millennial upheaval as it morphs into a poly-blend of four main strands of "traditional American Christianity" (p. 133).

Tickle’s thesis has a few problems however, but nonetheless leaves church leaders of tomorrow with a handful of important and challenging questions about what effective ministry in the future will look like.

Argumentative Problems: Oversimplification, Logic, Inaccuracies

Tickle spends a majority of her book looking back at several of the sea changes Christianity has gone through over the last 2,000 years, and drawing parallels between them in order to argue that the modern day church is also in the midst of a similar dramatic change and may have some of the same outcomes including liturgical reform, doctrinal realignment, a new fresh spirit in both the new and old tradition, as well as wars and pandemics.

Tickle writes, “...the only way to understand what is currently happening to us as twenty-first-century Christians in North America is first to understand that about every five hundred years the Church feels compelled to hold a giant rummage sale...about every five hundred years the empowered structures of institutionalized Christianity, whatever they may be at the time, become an intolerable carapace that must be shattered in order that renewal and new growth may occur” (16).

Such a grand sweeping historical thesis would be truly important and illuminating for the church’s self-reflection, but unfortunately, at the end of the day, her historical analysis is simply too superficial to lift her ambitious thesis and her cursory treatment of historical facts leads almost inevitably to oversights, logical fallacies, inaccuracies, and unlikely conjecture. 

At the heart of Tickle’s historical analysis is the assertion that about every five hundred years the church goes through a major change: the time around Gregory the Great, the Great Schism, and the "Great" Reformation. The church has of course gone through great reform at these times, but the church has undergone many more dramatic events and changes than just those few. What about the dramatic socio-political shift in the fourth century under Emperor Constantine the Great? Or the ocean of theology poured out on the church by the great “Doctor of the Church” Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century. Or the bi-continental revivals during “The Great Awakenings” whose theological narrative is still dominant today among a grand majority of evangelical Protestants in America?

For its entire life Christianity has been undergoing change and challenge; focusing on only the ones that happen every five hundred years is like drawing a constellation using only a few select stars in the sky: yes a picture can be created, but there are many more stars in the sky and more than just one picture that can be created with them.

A second problem is logic. Citing a skeptic is normally a ten yard penalty in productive discussions, but Hume's emphasis on the fallacy of inductive prediction is helpful in debunking Tickle's repeated claim that previous Christian periods of reform can help us understand and predict what will happen in the alleged current one.  For example, if someone had a bag of apples and pulled them out one at time and they all happened to be green does mean that one can logical conclude that the very next apple taken out of the bag won't be red. Put more specifically, even if there was a current reformer named Luther nailing 95 Theses to church doors, that still wouldn't mean that we could assume to understand anything about this new reformation or predict how it will unravel. The past simply cannot predict the future logically.

There are also several places where Tickle simply gets her history wrong. For example one of the most brazen errors occurs in her discussion over how Greek philosophy mutated Christian theology into a dualistic religion that then despised the physical temporal world (p. 161). Christianity undoubtably used and learned from Greek philosophy (specifically neo-Platonism and Stoicism), but it is completely untrue that Christianity therefore despised the physical world. The endless Arian controversies of the fourth century leave no room for doubt on that topic.

In addition to her troubles regarding previous times of great change in the Church, Tickle's prediction of the “Great Emergence” itself may also have some difficulties. The central tenant of her description of the Emergence is a Christianity that is blend of four currently distinct traditions. This sort of melting-pot theory was also the predicted result of the “Americanization” of many culturally distinct immigrants in the 18th century. However, it simply did not come to pass, and instead what emerged was a “salad bowl” of culture rather than a homogeneous blending of cultures. Perhaps then Tickle is incorrect in her prediction of such an ecclesiastical blending. Only time will tell.

Important Challenging Questions

Tickle’s historical thesis may need further development, but despite its deficiencies, her description of the Emergence itself it still raises crucially important questions that the church must face if her characterization of “The Great Emergence” is accurate.

One of the great unanswered questions that future church leaders are left with vis a vis emerging Christianity is similar to the central dramatic question raised in the critically acclaimed period drama “Downton Abbey:" how will Downton weather the financially trying and culturally changing times of the post War world? Up until the War, the Abbey's residents had blissfully and naively existed in their insular routines and had been coasting on timely infusions of capital despite being overstretched and financially mismanaged for years. 

Similarly, in the midst of such a metamorphosis of ecclesial culture how can the modern day church merge arcane ritual practices with modern sensibilities, continue to maintain huge aging physical edifices, train and employ expensive highly specialized staff, and still continue to benefit its local community in a meaningful way?

Will this new emergent melting-pot church turn out to be “The Great Abandonment” of the polity, principles, and property of the preceding parish? Will this new emergent spiritual revival spell financial ruin and the de-professionalization of ministry? Would that be entirely negative for the authenticity of the Church and God’s work in the world? Jesus once said that “you can’t put new wine in old wineskins,” does that mean that this new emerging spirit can’t be housed within the current structures of the Church without irreparably damaging each?

Darwin’s observation that species who adapt to a new environment have a better chance of surviving applies equally to the field of biology as it does to business and the church. If Tickle is correct and the environment is changing to favor those churches that can embrace a wide range of traditions, how then will the Episcopal Church will handle, weather, respond to, and thrive in this new environment? Is it ready, willing, and able to tweak its DNA to fit better with this new environment? Is it prepared for the conversation of longer teaching style sermons, fuller contemporary or charismatic worship experiences, more emphasis on Bible study, or the updating of its facilities to be more versatile? 

Phyllis Tickle’s The Great Emergence is a voice crying in the wilderness proclaiming the changing of a season, and can be a wake-up call to entrenched churches to repent and change their ways to receive new life in this next outpouring of the Spirit. It is the opinion of this author that the Episcopal Church is in a theologically advantageous position for this Emergence because within its very DNA exists a deep tolerance for a variety of voices and a rich tradition that balances “holding fast to that which is good” and “singing to the Lord a new song.”

Sources: 

Phyllis Tickle, The Great Emergence: How Christianity is Changing and Why (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2008).