Emergence Christianity

August 13, 2012
As Western culture and Christianity go through a period of upheaval, what historical forces and participants are shaping the birth of “emergence Christianity?” Building upon the foundation she created in her previous volume The Great Emergence, longtime religion observer and scholar Tickle, founding religion editor at PW, argues that the current semimillennial cultural and religious transformation (the last one being the Protestant Reformation) “is an across-the-board and still-accelerating shift in every single part and parcel of our lives as members in good standing of twenty-first-century Western or westernized civilization.” Tickle draws together strands as different as the Azusa Street revival, the Greenbelt music festival, the growth of house churches, and the birth of the Emergent Village Web site/community to chart the phenomena that have made the unseating of the old guard possible. In this complex and changeable context she includes groups like the “Hyphenateds” (those still affiliated with traditional Christian denominations), Emerging and Emergent communities, Neo-Monastics, and others. Not until near the book’s end does the reader realize how breathtakingly ambitious is Tickle’s attempt to describe the beliefs, disciplines, theology, and ecclesiology of this still-evolving movement. Readers who accept her thesis will appreciate and enjoy the book immensely. Even those who may not agree with her sweeping argument may find themselves fascinated by its audacity.

February 1, 2013

Tickle (The Great Emergence) has submitted yet another report on the condition of Christianity in America. The Emergent Church--a still-controversial and hard-to-define phenomenon--is, to Tickle and others, a crossdenominational, postpolitical vision of Christian fellowship and sincerity. All times are times of stress and change, and it is hard not to believe, for each of us, that we are in the midst of a revolution--Tickle certainly makes a convincing case for her conviction that this is a "great" moment in Christian history. VERDICT If you believe that Christianity is undergoing a great transformation, this is a crucial book; many Christians, liberal and conservative, should be intrigued.

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