Institutional Church versus Emerging Church
I
am a fan of the books of Phyllis Tickle, especially The Great Emergence and Emergence
Christianity. (Phyllis Tickle died in 2015 but her publisher is
maintaining her website at PhyllisTickle.com and there is also a nice Wikipedia
about her.) These books discuss the idea of a new, emerging Christianity. My Big
Question: What is the relationship between this emerging Christianity and our
institutional Church?
When
I heard her speak at our 2010 General Assembly, Tickle discussed this point.
She argued, (in part, I expect, because she was speaking to a large room of
Presbyterians) the Presbyterian Church was especially poised to adopt and adapt
to some the sweeping changes which emerging Christianity was introducing.
So my big question: What
is the relationship between emerging Christianity and our institutional Church?
Are these strands and styles of Christianity on completely separate tracks
never to touch? Will the new emerging Christianity grow up into expressions and
forms completely separate from our institutional Church? As an institutional church
person, this answer is not adequate. I believe there are enough people in the institutional
Church, like me and those younger than me, who are paying attention to emergent
themes that we will bring these themes and ideas and directions into our
institutions. On the other hand, I understand the institutional Church enough
to know that we are not, by and large, nimble, flexible and quickly creative.
Given the sheer weight of institutional inertia our institutions will not
suddenly become emergent Christian communities. Thus I believe we will have,
for a long time, a sometimes gentle and a sometimes clashing interaction
between our institutional Church and emergent Christianity.
These interactions will
inspire a host of auxiliary questions. If the institutional Church will adopt
some of the important and meaningful practices of emergent Christianity, what
are they? And, conversely, what practices and wisdom from the long heritage of
the institutional Church will emergent Christianity need as is flourishes?
Another related, big
question is how long will it take for emergent Christianity to fully emerge? We
can do a little bit of fun math on this question. Let us use Tickle’s thesis
that our emerging Christianity today is a reformation in the Church as
significant as the great Protestant Reformation. We can date the Protestant
Reformation as starting in 1517 (500 years ago this year) with Martin Luther’s
95 thesis nailing in Wittenberg. The first generation of the Protestant
Reformation we can roughly count from 1517 to the death of John Calvin in 1564
which is 47 years, from the death Calvin to the writing of the Westminster
Confession of Faith in 1646 is another 82 years, and from 1646 to the first
meeting of the Presbyterian General Assembly in America in 1789 is another 143
years. This is very artificial but we may date the Protestant Reformation from
Luther’s 95 to the advent of the Presbyterian General Assembly in America, a
total of 272 years. Similarly we can date the birth of emergent Christianity in
the year 1960, generally the year when our institutional Churches started our
unceasing decline. Using the Protestant Reformation as our model we may guess
that emergent Christianity will also take 272 to fully emerge. Thus the
emerging Christian faith which was birthed in 1960 will be fully grown and
mature in the year of our Lord 2232!
