Here is a wonderful video discussion by my great friend Phyllis Tickle and Spencer Burke of Theooze.TV. She has become one of the most important voices in the growing discussion of the Emerging Church.
Comments By Phyllis Tickle:
In general, short-range predictions are fairly dangerous things. Like loose boards on an aging country porch, they tend to fly up and hit one in the face. I try to avoid them for that very reason. On the other hand, sometimes something is not only compellingly obvious in and of itself, but so too is the need for its telling. Whether I am accurate in my observations or not remains to be seen … very soon, in this case … but the possibility of error does not eliminate the obligation to speak the truth as one sees it, any more than it defuses the urgency.
The notion of the eighteen-month (more or less) window upon us right now is hardly original with me, and I don’t want to presume by leaving that impression. My role, rather, is more that of commentator on something that is being said sotto voce pretty much all over the country just now. What is being said, I must hasten to add, is definitely being murmured more than broadcast. Yet that fact, in and of itself, I find to be indicative of the realness of what is being discussed.
And what is being recognized and named in resigned but laden conversation is that for all of us there probably is a critical period or window of eighteen (more or less) months between right now and the end of next year or the early months of 2011. In particular and most obviously, it is the established Christian denominations and communions that stand, as the old line says, upon the brink of an exquisite indecision.
Within the next eighteen to twenty-four months, denominations and established communions and the Christians who constitute them will decide, consciously or simply by default, whether “church” is first and foremost an experience of communal bonding, spiritual and religious expression, growth in concert with the ages, radical obedience, adoration, and transport or whether it is first and foremost an institution—one that does business and has structure and also structures which are to be supported, and one that is a means for organized interface with, and shaping of, the world external to it as the best means of effecting the Gospel’s principles upon and within culture.
Neither of these options is inherently more correct than the other, nor are they mutually exclusive. Likewise they are, again more or less, the distinctions that have increasingly separated Emergence Christianity from Protestantism and post-Reformation Catholicism for the past several decades.
What is different now—what is the source of commentary and urgency—is that the need to choose which of the two is to be primary in one’s life and which secondary seems to have risen to a boiling point … that is, the matter of emphasis and primary focus has now become so visible and has come to be framed so obviously that folk must address it, ready or not.
Parish by parish, congregation by congregation, household by household, individual by individual, just plain Christians are having to decide in which direction to channel their principal allegiance and affection. Those who are persuaded by the need for an institution will be drawn to its continuation and, in effecting that decision, will cause the institution to function more institutionally. Those who reject the institution as impediment will have to find ways to make a self-organizing body function effectively as the sum of its parts, as well as without violation to the integrity of free-standing units.
Those who understand church as experience and not institution, but who are loathe to lay aside the religious “guts” around which their natal denominations have institutionalized are going to become increasingly influential determinants about what both established Church and Emergence Christianity mature into.
Whether one calls this third body of folk the hyphenateds or by their sect-specific names of Methomergents, Luthermergents, Presbymergents, etc. matters not. What matters is that they are the “X” factor at the moment, What matter is that they are peeling off in increasing numbers from the institutionalized bodies out of which they have come. As they withdraw, they leave those inherited bodies more and more stripped of their resources and energy, certainly.
More importantly, however, they also leave those established, inherited communions devoid of disparate voices and arguably more temporally relevant points of view. The institutions—both those already so stripped and those being stripped—are finding, in the loss of discussion and differences of opinion and experience, a uniformity that, like uniformity everywhere, is stultifying.
Ultimately those institutions must seek out others of like mind and in like need in order to survive. This is precisely what we are seeing afoot right now and what we will continue to see more of, as re-institutionalizing Protestant denominations begin to merge their efforts into partnerships and alliances and even unions of shared ministry.
Meanwhile, Emergence Christianity is clearly entering into its own time of adolescence … a time when some of the enthusiasm of youth is having to be tempered by preparation for the burdens and delights of an approaching adulthood. The time will shortly be upon us when the bulk of Christian definition and experience will occur within the realm, and under the aegis of, Emergence fresh expressions of church; and that must … must … must be a sobering thought, albeit one that only the adolescent and not the child could ever have.
In all of this, the question of just how much the hyphenateds will influence the shaping and maturation of Emergence is very much up for grabs; but there is every reason to assume that the answer to it will clarify rather dramatically over the next few months.
We are pleased to forget sometimes that Protestants were made out of Roman Catholics. There was nowhere else for them to come from. Emergence is made out of Protestants and Roman Catholics with a few Orthodox thrown in; the process of mixing is the same, however, even as the pot boils on. So, to take things all the way back to where we commenced, within eighteen months or so, two or three things should at last become fairly clear.
The re-institutionalizing and re-traditioning bodies within Reformation Christianity should be more clearly and self-awaredly what they are. Emergence units and cohorts and gatherings should be equally aware that they are passing from something that was exciting and shot through with enthusiasm into something that is by way of becoming the body of Christ on earth for the majority of folk looking at Christianity and asking what it is in North America.
The hyphenateds will have begun at last, as their numbers swell, to decide where in all of this they fit, if indeed they do. And if they don’t … ? Well, then, in about eighteen months we should at least know what the next question is.
Phyllis Tickle is one of the most highly respected authorities and popular speakers on religion in America today.
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