Monday July 5, 2010
Phyllis Tickle, The Great Emergence
The book for the week at this year’s General Assembly is Phyllis Tickle’s The Great Emergence: How Christianity is Changing and Why (Baker Books, 2008). She is the guest speaker at several events during this year’s General Assembly including the Presbyterian Foundation breakfast, the Office of the General Assembly breakfast and the Association of Executive Presbyter’s reception.
This book, which I have studied carefully, offers a sweeping historical perspective and a convincing argument about the changes we are living through in our culture and church.
At the Office of the General Assembly breakfast today Phyllis Tickle told this wonderful story as illustration of her thesis. She was speaking at a church conference in Atlanta during which a youth group from a local church was helping serve the dinner. While she was speaking she noticed that one of these young people stopped their dish clean up tasks and started paying very careful attention to her talk. She was, at that time, discussing the doctrine of the Virgin Birth and the ways in which the importance and understanding of theological doctrine is changing in the church today. She was making the point that many new, emergent Christians are not much interested in systematic theology and the classic doctrines of the faith.
After her presentation, and after most of the people had left the room, this young person approached her and wanted to ask a question. The question was about the Virgin Birth. The young person asked what she had meant in her statement that doctrine did not matter much anymore. This young person said that he read the story of the Virgin Birth in the Bible. He thought it was a beautiful, poetic story, and it was very important to his faith.
Phyllis Tickle’s important point is that this perceptive young person exactly articulated the great emergence that is happening in the church. Systematic, precise, intellectual doctrines of theology, like the Virgin Birth, are being replaced with the importance of story, image and mystery, like the Virgin Birth. This is a profoundly new and different way to look at the same Bible story.
What is the difference between systematic theological doctrine and stories, images and metaphors as foundations for our faith? In this difference we see the some of the Great Emergence which is happening all around us.
