What Is It?
“The Great Emergence” refers to a monumental phenomenon in our world, and this book asks three questions about it. Or looked at the other way around, this book is about a monumental phenomenon considered from the perspective of three very basic questions: What is this thing? How did it come to be? Where is it going? The third question is loaded, by the way. Fully stated, what it really means to ask is, not just where is this thing going, but also where is it taking us as it goes?
As a phenomenon, the Great Emergence has been slipping up on us for decades in very much the same way spring slips up on us week by week every year. Though it may have sent us a thousand harbingers of its approach, we are still surprised to wake up one balmy morning to a busy, chirping world that, a mere twenty-four hours before, had been a gray and silent one. Our surprise does not mean that all of us have failed to notice the first, subtle shiftings of the seasons. It just means that most of us haven’t bothered to think about them; because at a practical or useful level, spring isn’t “here” until it’s fully enough here to make a difference in our mundane lives—in what we decide to wear, how we plan our activities, and what to do with our time, even in what and how much we decide to eat. So it has been with us and the Great Emergence. If it was indeed coming our way, then most of us would prefer to deal with it after it was fully here and not while it was merely sending intimations of itself.
There has been a certain economy of effort in that “Wait ’til it actually gets here” attitude. For one thing, even during the closing years of the twentieth century, the Great Emergence was as hard to catch as spilled mercury on a high school lab counter. Like mercury, its major, public use was for making either conversation or amateur temperature gauges. For another thing, and very unlike liquid mercury, it was amorphous, lacking any cohesion or, for that matter, any clear borders or definable circumference. But since then, a century has rolled over us, bringing with it the rejuvenating hopes and promises of a new millennium and the keen awareness that, whatever it may be for good or ill, the Great Emergence is to be a major part of this new season in our human years.
Like every “new season,” this one we recognize as the Great Emergence affects every part of our lives. In its totality, it interfaces with, and is the context for, everything we do socially, culturally, intellectually, politically, economically. When, for instance, a book on global economics can become a mega-seller, what we are really acknowledging to ourselves at a popular level is something we had already sensed but had not wanted to acknowledge, namely that the world really has gone flat again. Among other things, we are admitting at last that classic economics do not apply nearly so well to a service-based economy as they once did to our production-based ones. We are acknowledging as well that national borders and national loyalties no longer hold as once they did. We are accepting as well the absolute fact that now even a small nation can hold a large one hostage, because technology and the knowledge of how to use it have leveled the playing field. No one is privileged anymore, or at least not in the old ways of physical wealth and sheer manpower.
When we become agitated—and agitate each other—about how we are drowning in information overload, in correspondence, and in the stress of unending “To-Do” lists, we are talking about the Great Emergence, or at least about one small part of its presence as a new time in human history. When, for example, we discover we can no longer do so simple a thing as running sums in our heads, but instead have to turn to our calculators, we are recognizing that we are storing more and more of our “selves” outside of ourselves and thereby creating a dependency that is, at the very least, unsettling. Dependency on machines, in other words, is part of the Great Emergence, and it infiltrates far more than our mundane activities. It infiltrates as well our unsettled and unsettling inability to determine where the line is between us and machines . . . how many of them we will allow into our bodies, how much we will allow them to simulate our actions, how long we will be able to control them. For that matter, we pale before the questions of creating life itself or even of simply engineering it. We grow ever more alarmed that the so-called footprint of human presence in our tech-driven world is killing the earth, yet we feel powerless to stop her demise. Or we have to accept the relativeness of universal laws and the unpredictabilities of quantum physics and cannot stop those facts from leeching over into our ways of seeing “truth” and “fact.” These also are signs and evidences of the Great Emergence. Their listing, in fact, is almost boundless, so pervasive is the nature of the shift we are passing through.
It is, however, not with the whole of the Great Emergence that we are concerned here. Rather, it is with religion—and specifically with Christianity in North America—that we are concerned at the moment.
The Right Reverend Mark Dyer, an Anglican bishop known for his wit as well as his wisdom, famously observes from time to time that the only way to understand what is currently happening to us as twenty-first-century Christians in North America is first to understand that about every five hundred years the Church feels compelled to hold a giant rummage sale. And, he goes on to say, we are living in and through one of those five-hundred-year sales. Now, while the bishop may be using a bit of humor to make a point, his is nonetheless a deadly serious and exquisitely accurate point. Any usable discussion of the Great Emergence and what is happening in Christianity today must commence with yesterday and a discussion of history. Only history can expose the patterns and confluences of the past in such a way as to help us identify the patterns and flow of our own times and occupy them more faithfully.
The first pattern that we must consider as relevant to the Great Emergence is Bishop Dyer’s rummage sale, which, as a pattern, is not only foundational to our understanding but also psychologically very reassuring for most of us. That is, as Bishop Dyer observes, about every five hundred years the empowered structures of institutionalized Christianity, whatever they may be at that time, become an intolerable carapace that must be shattered in order that renewal and new growth may occur. When that mighty upheaval happens, history shows us, there are always at least three consistent results or corollary events.
First, a new, more vital form of Christianity does indeed emerge. Second, the organized expression of Christianity which up until then had been the dominant one is reconstituted into a more pure and less ossified expression of its former self. As a result of this usually energetic but rarely benign process, the Church actually ends up with two new creatures where once there had been only one. That is, in the course of birthing a brand-new expression of its faith and praxis, the Church also gains a grand refurbishment of the older one. The third result is of equal, if not greater, significance, though. That is, every time the incrustations of an overly established Christianity have been broken open, the faith has spread—and been spread—dramatically into new geographic and demographic areas, thereby increasing exponentially the range and depth of Christianity’s reach as a result of its time of unease and distress. Thus, for example, the birth of Protestantism not only established a new, powerful way of being Christian, but it also forced Roman Catholicism to make changes in its own structures and praxis. As a result of both those changes, Christianity was spread over far more of the earth’s territories than had ever been true in the past.