One singularly sunny midsummer day in 2006, Chad Allen, Doug Pagitt, and his wife, Shelley, took me to lunch. While I remember very little about what we ate, what we talked about has lived in every part of my life every day since, and that is a bold statement.
Allen, who is now editorial director of Baker Books, was an acquisitions editor at the time; and Pagitt was, as he still is, senior pastor of Solomon’s Porch in Minneapolis and a major voice in Emergent Village and Emergence Christianity both in this country and in the world at large. In 2006 he was also two other things. He was the editor, for Baker Books and in cooperation with Emergent Village, of a line of books designed to present and explicate this new form of Christianity that was burgeoning forth among us. He was also smart enough to bring Shelley to lunch. Of the three of them, she was probably the most persuasive about the fact that what the gentlemen wanted done did indeed want to be done. And what the gentlemen wanted was a book, under the ēmersion imprint, which would report in narrative form the history of Emergence and describe in accessible terms its place in North American Christianity in the twenty-first century.
Out of that luncheon came, in 2008, the original edition of the book you now hold in your hand. The only difference that has been effected in it over the years is that The Great Emergence no longer bears the ēmersion imprint, simply because Emergence and the Village have grown to such stature as to no longer need a series of books to introduce themselves to each other or to their fellow Christians. Pagitt, Allen, and Baker Books have done their job well, though I suspect Shelley and I are both a bit sad at the loss of ēmersion their success has brought with it.
But in all the changes and growth, listening and strenuous praying in the years since that pivotal luncheon, one thing has remained constant: Shelley was right. The Great Emergence and the Emergence Christianity that has come out of it, and that continues to come, have a story that wants telling . . . a story that must be told . . . a story both very holy and very human. So if this edition of The Great Emergence can be said to be dedicated to anything other than the urgency of its own message, then it is dedicated to Shelley Pagitt, who knew and understood from the first and had the grace to say so.