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The Great Emergence: How Christianity is Changing, & Why

Reviewed by Alun Brookfield.

If you want to get a handle on the global and historical picture of what’s happening to the worldwide church, this little book is worth every penny of its price tag (it's available in the UK from LionHudson, Oxford). This is a work of excellent journalism rather than theology, a carefully observed assessment of all the stories which go to make up our current situation.

I confess I found it hard going at times, because the author, who is a respected authority and a popular speaker on religion in America today, doesn’t answer the question in the title until the final section of the book, and even then, her answer took me a little by surprise. The cover blurb doesn’t help much either because what she says in this book is applicable to the whole world, and not just America.

The book is arranged in three sections, each dealing with different aspects of what she calls “the Great Emergence”: What is it; how did it come to be; and where is it going?

Her main thesis is that, roughly every 500 years, the Church cleans out its attic, has a rummage sale and redefines itself. The previous major attic turnouts have been the collapse of the Roman Empire, the Great Schism with the Eastern churches, and the Reformation and Counter-Reformation. She then goes on to argue that we are now in the middle of another such event, and, yes, it’s uncomfortable and unsettling, but what will emerge will be a reshaped Christianity, stronger, leaner, fitter than before, as was the case on each of the previous occasions. Readers may not agree with Tickle’s thesis, but this reviewer found that it helped put our current anxieties into a global and historical perspective.

The third section of the book attempts to answer the question: Where is the Great Emergence going? Ultimately, of course, we can’t know its final destination, but Tickle offers some signposts, which this reviewer found thought-provoking and helpful.

Anyone who is facing up to the reality that we cannot go on doing the same as we have been doing and expect a different result needs to read this book during a three or four day retreat, so that there is time to reflect on its implications for the way we do church in our time and place.