The Great Emergence: How Christianity Is Changing and Why Paperback – Illustrated, September 1, 2012

Phyllis Tickle is one of the spokespersons and historians for the Emerging/Emergent Church. Her premise in "the Great Emergence" is that there are major changes in Christendom that happen every 500 years and she takes the reader through those past events and brings us to the changes that are occurring now in the Global Church, particularly in the United States.The reader will need to be prepared to read this book with a good dictionary at hand or by googling the definition of words online. If you are a history buff and a strategic thinker, this book will be a challenge to you. Ms. Tickle highlights timelines, people and events who have influenced along with inventions and technology to show what is emerging today in the global church. She spends quite a bit of time from the Reformation and what happened in the 20th Century and its impact upon the Church today, particularly regarding the centrality of Scripture and other trends that are shaping our faith and morality.Then she shows what the church is looking like today and what is may look like or how it could be changing shape in the next couple of decades through a grid of those who come from liturgical, social justice Christians, renewalist and conservative backgrounds. I have heard Ms. Tickle speak on this subject and she is also an incredible speaker and one of the most popular speakers on religion in America today, not to mention that she is 70+ years old. This book will make you think and will encourage you to learn more of what is happening in the world and in the church today and hopefully to act upon what you learn.

I especially recommend this book for those who have become dissatisfied with religious Christianity, and instead describe themselves as “spiritual, not religious.” It brings some perspective to the current chaos and competition among the Christian religions, and helped me gain some clarity as to my own position within the milieu.Phyllis Tickle’s The Great Emergence is a broad-strokes description of how the Christian religion has gotten to where it is today and how it is currently going through another historical transformation. Tickle uses sophisticated language and some lite references to roughly survey of the evolution of changing authority behind Christian beliefs, including the authority of the Emperor Constantine to form a Bible and clear doctrines, of monasteries which preserved the Bible and doctrines through the Dark Ages and thus anchored them in culture, of the Eastern Orthodox Patriarch and the Roman Pope, and of the Bible as the “Word of God.” She also goes about briefly showing how Christianity debunks its own authorities about every 500 years (not on a strict schedule, but as cultural conditions change and in unison with cultural changes). She concludes with some very specific formative points of the new Emergent and Emerging Christianity, which is in process, but sadly those points get smothered in a lot of other discussion unless one is paying close attention.Somewhat wordy, but well worth reading. Tickle’s book helps me to get a handle on the history of church and institutionalized religion and their relationship to several elements of current culture that are changing both church and religion. She also gave me some very specific ideas of some forces that are clearly influencing and forming the Christianity of the next 500 years.This is a great book for the sincere spiritual seeker coming out of the Christian tradition. www.ChristopherAune.com

Phyllis Tickle's newest book, The Great Emergence: How Christianity Is Changing and Why, arrived yesterday. At 172 pages, this small but elegant volume (aren't all Tickle's books elegant?) both informs and disappoints. Tickle takes on the daunting task of reviewing the major turning points or `Great' events in the life of the Christian church. Her contention is that every 500 years or so the church goes through a `great' transformation.Counting back from the present, the Great Reformation took place about 500 years ago -- 1517 to be exact. Prior to that, The Great Schism occurred when the Eastern and Western churches split over icons and statues. Five hundred years earlier, Gregory the Great blessed and encouraged the monastic orders which would preserve the Christian faith through the Dark Ages. Of course, 500 years before that, we're back in the first century and the time of the apostles. Today, Tickle contends, the church in in the throes of The Great Emergence.But, the Great Emergence is not just religious. It is also cultural, technological, and sociological. Of course, context shaped each of the other `great' church transformations as well, and this time is no different. Tickle takes the reader on an overflight of church history, world events, and charts the shifts in the center of authority in the life of the church. In the Great Reformation, of course, the cry of authority was sola scriptura - only scripture. Tickle traces the diminution of the authoritative place of scripture in culture and Christianity from its heady beginnings in the Reformation to its marginalization in the current postmodern era. The book provides thoughtful tracing of influential elements as Tickle leads the reader on a quest for a center of authority.But, while Tickle's insights and examples provide clues to the transformative forces in our culture and society, the book disappoints when we arrive at the present. Tickle sees all denominations, all churches, all movements in the quadrant of Christianity -- conservative, liturgical, renewalist, and social justice -- as converging toward the center. Granted, there are those denominations and groups that cling to their identities in a kind of resistant pushback, but Tickle's vision is that we are all being swept up into the next great moment of the church -- The Great Emergence. Every church, not just the cool emerging church types, are part of The Great Emergence. I'm not sure that is happening, but I could have lived with Tickle's opinion except for some examples she uses.Tickle uses John Wimber and the Vineyard churches as an example of this new kind of emergence. She correctly credits Quakers -- Richard Foster, Parker Palmer, etc -- with great influence on the spirituality of the Great Emergence. I might add Elton Trueblood to that list, as mentor to Foster, but Tickle doesn't. But, in her citing of John Wimber, she goes off track. She credits Wimber with being a "founder" of the Church Growth department at Fuller, and calls Peter Wagner his colleague. I was present at Fuller during Wagner's tenure, and I was enrolled in the DMin program in church growth. I attended one of the Signs and Wonders classes, heard Wimber speak, and got a sense of his idea of `power evangelism.'Wimber was not a founder of the church growth movement. He was an adjunct faculty member at Fuller. Dr. Donald McGavran was the founder, Peter Wagner was his protege. I met McGavran once, although he had retired when I was enrolled at Fuller. Tickle misunderstands Wimber's approach, and also overestimates the Quaker influence on Wimber. Wimber left the traditional church in which he had become a Christian because he wanted to `do the stuff' -- heal the sick, raise the dead, cast out demons, and so on. I also attended the Vineyard church that Wimber headed, and it was no Quaker meeting. So, at the end of the book, Tickle disappoints. Simple fact-checking could have offered a corrective to her inclusion of Wimber.While Wimber did create a powerful new church community called Vineyard, he used signs and wonders as power evangelism to win people to Christ. All of that was very much part of the church growth movement that believed in attractional evangelism. Wimber's brand just happened to be one of the more interesting versions of church growth techniques being used to gather people. She also wrongly attributes the concept of bounded sets and centered sets to Wimber when actually it was Paul Hiebert, the missiologist, who used those concepts to illustrate new approaches to understanding the place of persons in the Kingdom of God.Would I recommend the book? A qualified yes is in order here. The book succeeds in all but the last chapter. If you want a great overview of where Christianity has been, what the influences were that got it there, and where it might be headed, Tickle's book provides a good, concise overview. My disappointment was that it fails to see clearly the way forward, and misinterprets some of the church's most recent experiements, such as Vineyard. But, Tickle is an elegant writer, and the book is a valuable resource to those aware of its short-comings.

This is a really helpful, well-written, relatively brief overview and evaluation of some of the changes effecting the Christian Church in the early 21st century. Whilst clearly written in and for the North American context, The Great Emergence deserves a much wider readership and was largely relevant to the UK scene as well.Phyllis Tickle's thesis is that every 500 years or so something occurs in Church history which effects a change so profound that a new era can be discerned. She refers to events in the 6th century, culminating in Pope Gregory the Great's support and encouragement for Monasticism - arguably Christianity's lifeline through the Dark Ages. The Great Schism of 1054 is the 11th century's defining moment, as the Western Catholic Church separates from the Eastern Orthodox Churches, The 16th century Great Reformation produces the seemingly never-ending variety and diversity of the Protestant traditions, as well as a renewed and reformed Roman Catholicism. And, so our author contends, the early 21st century is witnessing The Great Emergence of new ways of being and doing church. Sometimes referred to as Emerging Church or Emergent Church, these alternatives to the inherited structures of the existing churches and denominations are seen as offering hope for a new kind of church, as well as offering the prospect of a form of renewal and reformation of the inherited structures from which they have come.The overview of church history was simple without being simplistic, and maintained a hopeful and optimistic outlook throughout. This will not be the only book you will need to read on the subject, but would make a good starting place for many.Phyllis Tickle was an experienced and respected academic, writer and publisher, and was the founding editor of the religion department of Publishers Weekly. In 2015 she was diagnosed with lung cancer, and died in September 2015.

Listened to this as an Audiobook. It gives a brilliant overview of the church and helps to understand that the way we see Christianity today is not how it has always been.

Not an easy read if you've not seen utube videos of Phyllis Tickle lecturing in Toronto and UK

Just what I needed - a great overview even though specific to American churches

I'm finding Phyllis Tickle's book, "The Great Emergence," difficult to put down and yet one that I want to have last as an experience. A difficult bind, especially given the fact that this is a relatively short and easily read book."The Great Emergence" views Christianity as a part of our culture that undergoes cyclical change about every five hundred years. She discusses the precursors of Christianity, earlier times of change, possible precipitants of a current and coming change, and likely outcomes. A fascinating point of view that leads to intellectually provocative conclusions.I'll certainly recommend it to many people---including you.