The Great Emergence: How Christianity is Changing and Why

The Great Emergence: How Christianity is Changing and Why; by Phyllis Tickle (2008)

This book attracted a huge amount of attention when it was published in 2008. Its comments about the Church’s cycle of “great rummage sales” is still one of the most frequently quoted ideas I hear in conversations about church change. This idea appears in the very first pages of the book and seems to be an earworm of an idea for many readers. (The rummage sale idea actually came from the Rt Revd Mark Dyer, which Tickle is very clear about, but this book gets the credit more often than not.) So, for a book that dominated conversation 15 years ago, how do the ideas hold up?

Tickle does a great job of tracing, with very broad strokes, the development of the Church over the past 2,000 years. She points out the times of greatest turmoil and change, which do seem to come in roughly 500 year cycles. She offers several thoroughly modern models for thinking about this process of change and, in the last third of the book, applies these models to make some guesses at where our current period of Church change might take us.

One of the troubles when painting with broad strokes is that details sometimes get lost. There’s only so much space in any book. The writing in The Great Emergence is accessible and introduces historical patterns in the Church and several important theological concepts. It’s a short book (about 165 pages) with plenty of questions for thought/discussion at the end and some suggested further reading. I think it would make a good introduction to the historic patterns of change in the Church and some of the broad differences between various groups of Christians. I would definitely recommend further reading on all of the topics introduced here to fill in some of the missing details. Though, I suppose I always recommend further reading on every subject, so that’s nothing new! The Great Emergence would make a very fine introduction to many Christian topics and a good springboard into the topics that the reader finds most intriguing.