Book Openers: The Emerging, Emergent Church — What’s Up Next for Christianity?

By Barbara Falconer Newhall

The Great Emergence: How Christianity Is Changing and Why, by Phyllis Tickle, Baker Books, 172 pages, $17.99

“About every five hundred years the Church feels compelled to hold a giant rummage sale,” Phyllis Tickle  writes in her new book, The Great Emergence.  In the two thousand years since its founding, Christianity has reinvented itself several times, casting off the old encumbrances. This time, Tickle says, the rummage sale is making room for a new, post-modern, “networked Christianity.”

A veteran editor, writer and observer of the American religion scene, Tickle believes that a radical reconfiguration is currently taking place in the North American Church. Known as the emergent or emerging church, it’s a re-structuring of Christianity that compares in scope and consequence to the Great Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century, the Great Schism of the eleventh century, and the monastic reforms of Gregory the Great way back in the sixth century.

Open The Great Emergence and find out where a lot of Christians think their church is heading next.