6

The Gathering Center

And the Many Faces of a Church Emerging

Stories about the evolution of the Great Transformation are, as a rule, fairly skeletal, but they do include one of singular interest to us here. They include the history and naming of that moment and place where what had been a variant or new form of Abrahamic religion became so distinct and other as to merit a new name peculiar unto itself. The story of that dramatic shift, recorded in the Book of the Acts, chapter 11, chronicles the gradual concentration, over a period of several months, of reconfiguring Cypriots and Cyreneans in the city of Antioch. As their numbers and enthusiasm grew, they in essence rose to the pitch of outright foment, calling first Barnabas and then Paul to come and minister to them. And it was in that place and within the time of that foment, we are told, that the newly reconfigured believers were first called Christian. It was at that point that this new thing—this new way of being faithful in a new world—became so clearly distinct from what had been as to be worthy of a name of its own.

In the same way, while it is difficult, if not impossible, to select any one event or date in the fourteenth century as being the tipping point that slid Europe over into the Great Reformation, we do know when and where those tensions gave birth to the form of Christianity we now know as Protestantism. Or at least we know something analogous to that. We know that the original Protestatio, from which the new way of being derived its name, was drawn up only twelve years after Luther wrote his 95 Theses. In February of that year, 1529, the Diet of Speyer met and passed legislation that, in essence, denied freedom of religious exercise in any form other than that of Roman Catholicism and declared an end to toleration of any deviations from the established form of Latin Christianity. Two months later, in April, five “re-forming” princes and fourteen cities of the Holy Roman Empire, feeling themselves compelled by God to speak their new truth, signed a Protestatio and, in so doing, gave their new form of Christianity its name. Such has not been the case with the Great Emergence.

There is simply no grand framing story or even unanimity of opinion yet about when precisely it was that this new thing—this new, emerging way of being Christian in an emerging new world—became so clearly distinct from what had been as to be worthy of a name of its own. None of us can, with confidence, look back over the closing years of the twentieth century and say, “Here . . . just here . . . is when we can see enough of the thing to declare that it is actively here and distinctly separate from all that has previously been.” We can, however, trace some of the course of its coming by looking at what religion scholars and historians observed and wrote during that century of emergence’s early formation in North America.

Perhaps the first prominent American scholar actually to perceive what was happening and then write about it in some detail was Walter Rauschenbusch. As early as 1907, Rauschenbusch declared that Western humanity was “in the midst of a revolutionary epoch fully as thorough as that of the Renaissance and Reformation” and predicted an approaching crisis for the Church as well as the society in which it existed.[14]

By midcentury, we find observers like Paul Tillich speaking in letters and conversation about shifting times and shifting foundations; and by the mid- to late-sixties, matters had become even clearer. Before the decade’s end, scholars had begun not only to speak about and describe what was happening but also to predict what probably was going to happen. World War II was over, Hiroshima and the Holocaust were facts, Korea and the Berlin Wall were raw memories in a tense world, the Drug Age was upon us, Mainline Protestantism was just beginning to wither a bit, the Jesus Freaks were bizarre as well as faintly worrisome, Vietnam was everywhere and always in our faces . . . the world had wobbled entirely free of its axis, and all things were at last in full upheaval.

Sketching the Church

By the end of the 1960s, historians, theologians, and observers were also beginning to define the times and predict the coming decades in terms of a new paradigm that they could, and did, begin to sketch out in diagram form. What they were doing by the late 1960s was tentative at first and looked something like the following illustration.

Called a quadrilateral, the assessment was that by the turn of the century North American Christianity (including all its extant forms) would be divided into four, roughly equal groups or categories like those shown below.[15] The quadrilateral shown here is different in a point or two from earlier ones circulating in the late 1960s, however. Originally, for instance, the term “Liturgicals” in the left upper quadrant was assumed to mean, at a practical, working level, only Roman Catholics and Anglicans, along with a few Lutheran congregations of a more liturgical bent. There was, at that time, so small a presence in North America of either Oriental or Eastern Orthodoxy as to make inclusion of those bodies in broad overviews superfluous. That is no longer true, and the reader should assume the presence of the Orthodox as now being very much a part of the Liturgical quadrant.

Originally, commentators called the upper right box by the name of “Mainline” Christians. Today that term not only has no real meaning, but it also carries a certain erroneous cachet of morbidity in popular conversation. Instead, it is now more customary to use the term, as here, “Social Justice” Christians.

As we noticed earlier, the term “Renewalists” in the lower left box is of more recent coinage and means to include both Charismatic and Pentecostal Christians under one rubric. The last box—the lower right one—is the difficult one. At one point, it was labeled “Fundamentalists,” but if “Mainline” bears an unfortunate cachet in the public conversation, “Fundamentalist” bears a downright odoriferous one. The name for this fourth quadrant has accordingly shifted time and time again over the years from “Evangelicals” to “Theocrats” to “Conservatives” and back again. For the time being, the latter title of “Conservatives” seems the more inclusive and most neutral label.

Not included here are two significant bodies—Mormons and Quakers. Mormonism, which is growing rapidly domestically and globally, is arguably the fourth of the great Abrahamic faiths rather than a subset or variant of Christianity and increasingly is so treated by religionists. Accordingly, it is omitted here. The omission of the Quakers is a temporary, narrative convenience rather than an omission as such. We will touch on their considerable contribution to, and unique place in, the Great Emergence in due time.

Changing Shapes

In considering this initial diagram, the temptation is to do as we have just done and think of each box in terms of the strands or denominations that fall within it—Roman Catholics within the Liturgical quadrant, Methodists in the Social Justice box, Southern Baptists in the Conservative one, Assemblies of God in the Renewalists quadrant, etc. There was a time—fifty, forty, even perhaps thirty years ago—when each denomination or communion in North American Christendom was internally consistent and cohesive enough for that sort of parsing to be, if not ideal, at least not incorrect. Such ceased to be the case at least fifteen or twenty years before the change in the millennium, as we shall shortly see. As a result, now one must instead regard each of the four quadrants as being composed not only of traditional denominations but also and more particularly of Christians whose greatest, but not total, set of persuasions is toward the form of Christian practice named in a particular box. For that reason, the original shape of the quadrilateral has been changed of late to resemble something nearer to a cruciform presentation like this:

There is an old joke which contends that it makes a difference which sy-LAB-ble one puts the em-PHAS-is on. That is true in this case as well. That is, both Roman Catholicism as a branch of the faith and Roman Catholics as practitioners of the faith are famous for their deep concern for, and involvement in, issues of social justice. It would therefore be hugely inaccurate to think that they, as Liturgicals, have no interest or stake in Social Justice. By the same token, Methodists who, by tradition as well as founding, sit squarely in the Social Justice box, are equally famous for their development of new Christian liturgies, not to mention their adaptations of traditional ones.

What the boxes mean, in other words, is that one locates oneself or one’s faith community on the map in terms of that which is more, or most, important in one’s Christian practice. The two intersecting axes, consequently, should be visualized not as arbitrary or hard-and-fast lines meant to contain but rather as convenient and pliant demarcations intended only to clarify. In either case, the tension between the two upper boxes is still St. Paul’s very ancient one of that between faith and works. That is, if on a Sabbath morning at 11:00 a.m.—and only at 11:00 a.m.—one can either build a habitat for humanity or go to the mass, the Social Justice Christian will say that faith without works is meaningless and go build the house, albeit with some regret. The Liturgical will counter that works without faith are empty and go to participate in the mass, likewise with some regret. Each constituency, in other words, will almost always have some exercise in the other’s quadrant of concern.

Even as Liturgicals can be very concerned with social justice, though, so too can they be very definitely charismatic and/or Pentecostal. Or conversely, more and more often nowadays, fully charismatic congregations are incorporating forms of ancient liturgy in their worship, while at the same time exploring very conservative theology and exegesis. And so it goes—semi-permeable lines of division that mean to suggest places on a spectrum rather than absolute boundaries.

Just as there is a reason for the vertical axis of the original quadrilateral, so too there is a distinction being made by the horizontal one. That is, those Christians and communions above the center axis are placed there and together because, in general, for both of those quadrants what one does religiously is more central to his or her understanding of Christian living than is what one believes doctrinally. Conversely, the Christians and communions below the horizontal axis are placed there together because for them what one doctrinally believes is more central than what one does religiously. Nowhere in this should anybody assume that religiously or ritually based actions don’t matter to Southern Baptists or that beliefs and creeds don’t matter to Presbyterians. That is simply (and dangerously) not true. The distinction, rather, is in the definition, site, and centrality of the rectitude exercised by each.

Thus, one can be a very devout Episcopalian and be a bit conflicted—openly so even—about the historicity of the Virgin Birth. But what one would never do is allow a bit of wine spilt from the chalice to remain on the floor for the altar guild to wipe up with a rag later. Rather, one must immediately (or as soon as one notices the drop) stoop down and either use the purificator or take upon one’s finger or fingers the blood of Our Lord and consume it there and then, grit and all. Or, should one be a mainline or Social Justice Lutheran and be in charge of making the new “fair linen” for the dressing of the communion table, one must be sure to put the precise and required number of stitches in each inch of those linens. Otherwise, the work will have to be ripped out and redone, because there is holy significance and symbolic importance to each of the numbers of stitches assigned to each piece of the work. Such emphasis on religious action or physicality is called orthopraxy, an adaptation from Greek for the concept of “right” or “correct” (ortho) practice (praxis).

By contrast, a devout Southern Baptist traditionally believes homosexuality is moral sin and a religious offense, yet he or she may have gay friends and beloved homosexual relatives. Keeping company with such friends and relatives is perfectly all right, so long as one remains clear that they are sinners. The old cliché of “hate the sin, love the sinner” is usually the rhetoric of choice for negotiating the resulting conundrum. In the same way, drinking is wrong, but an occasional drink with Roman Catholic friends for the sake of neighborliness, for instance, is acceptable so long as one perceives real drinking as religious transgression or infraction. Such emphasis on intellectual allegiance to doctrinal and moral codes is known as orthodoxy, again from the Greek and meaning “right” or “correct” doctrine or belief.

The Gathering Center

But these distinctions, too, are semi-permeable and allow the bowing of the horizontal lines, the result being a rounder, more cordial, or cruciform, presentation of the four major divisions in historic North American Christianity as it came into the closing decades of the twentieth century. What happened during those decades in the sociopolitical, economic, cultural, and intellectual context of the Great Emergence was to have the greatest imaginable impact on the cruciform diagram, however, and change it to something like this:

The twentieth century in the United States was characterized by many things, none of them more obvious than our originally slow, and eventually rapid, shift from being a rural to being an urban people. As the decades rolled along, more and more of us left the open spaces of pastures and plains for the defined ones of streets and neighborhoods. We laid aside as well the isolation and occasional socializing of country living for the constant companionship and unavoidable socializing of town and city life. Before the century’s end, millions of us would not even be living in suburban neighborhoods any longer, but rather in the much tighter confines of apartment houses or condo complexes or multifamily buildings. Likewise, instead of earning our livelihood in solitary or near-solitary labor, more and more of us were earning it in offices or factories or commercial enterprises where we were in constant and fairly intimate contact with one another for the bulk of every working day.

Religion is very important to Americans and always has been. Statistically, it preoccupies or to some extent informs almost 90 percent of us; and nobody can even begin to gauge how much of our conversation is shaped around, or concerned with, it. The inevitable result, then, of our predisposition toward religious discussion and the increasing intensity of our contact with one another in both our private and working lives, was a construct that religion observers were, by the 1980s, beginning to refer to as watercooler theology.

Where once the country parson or the Holy Bible and family tradition about what it said had been the fount from which theology flowed, if it flowed at all, now popular opinion began to carry the day. Or if it did not carry the day, it certainly stirred up the questions. How could it fail to? For not only was there conversation about God-matters, but there was also a sudden diversity in the conversationalists gathered in the break room or chatting in the halls or swapping opinions on the elevator about the proper interpretation of current events.

Now the good Roman Catholic had to hear—or at least listen to—the spin an evangelical put on euthanasia; and the dyed-in-the-wool Presbyterian had to consider tales of miraculous healing from Church of God in Christ folk who had seen the thing itself actually happen. Evangelicals, by default and unintentionally, began to hear things about, and observe lives governed by, liturgical seasons and unfathomable popish practices like observing fixed-hour prayer. Staid American Baptists heard about Taizé and found themselves buying into the whole thing, but so too did their Southern Baptist cousins to whom they hadn’t spoken in over a century. And so it went. The center was beginning to form. The old, natal divisions were beginning to melt away, especially there where their four corners met.

It was a slow process at first; and it certainly was an unintentional and unselfconscious one. It was just people—people swapping stories and habits, people admiring the ways of some other people whom they liked, people curious and able now to ask without offense. And more than anything else, it was people finding deep within themselves an empty spot or some niggling hunger or a restive, questioning impatience they had not experienced before, or at least had not been empowered to acknowledge before. So the swapping back and forth in public conversation and socializing went on.

As changes go, this one was aggravated or expedited, depending on one’s point of view, by the fact that we were for the first time in history living not only in constant physical proximity with one another but also in subjective proximity. We were living in a media age. Newspapers, magazines, radio, television, and in one mighty burst of glory, the Internet saw to it that ideas flew about like bees in an overturned hive. We not only knew what everybody else was thinking, but we were able to counter and then be countered, back and forth unendingly, about ideas and values and meaningfulness—ideas and values that, ultimately, were about God and life and how it is to be lived. Religion, in other words. And watercooler theology, by the 1990s, had given way to ubiquitous theology, public, shared, and incredibly vital, even by this country’s standards.

American religion had never had a center before, primarily because it was basically Protestant in its Christianity; and Protestantism, with its hallmark characteristic of divisiveness, has never had a center. Now one was emerging, but what was emerging was no longer Protestant.[16] It was no longer any “thing,” actually. It was simply itself, a mélange of “things” cherry-picked from each quadrant and put together—some would say cobbled together—without any original intention and certainly with no design beyond that of conversation.

Since established churches, regardless of the quadrant in which they were located, could not accommodate such an ill-defined and amorphous presentation of the faith, the new faithful began to meet among themselves and hold worship services among and with those of like spirit. The house church movement began and then quietly boomed, as did such outré things as pub theology and bowling alley masses. In time, of course, some of these gatherings would grow into nondenominational churches. Some have become domestic communities and are eventuating in what we now call “the new monasticism,” a way of being in which Christians, bound together under vows of stability, live out their private lives together in radical obedience to the Great Commandment. Other gatherings of emergents have no site at all and roam from public park to football stadium to Seventh-day Adventist churches to high school gyms, as the case may be in any given week. Some others, from time to time, fall heir, for a song, to old and abandoned church buildings which they occupy but feel only slight need to “fix up” in the traditional sense. All, however, share one shining characteristic: they are incarnational. Not only is Jesus of Nazareth incarnate God, but Christian worship must be incarnate as well. It must involve the body in all its senses and take place among people, all of whom are embraced equally and as children of God.

There is enormous energy in centripetal force, especially as it gathers more and more of its own kind into itself. Centripetal force, though, is usually envisioned by us as running downward, like the water in a bathtub drain. The gathering force of the new Christianity did the opposite. It ran upward and poured itself out, like some bursting geyser, in expanding waves of influence and nourishment. Where once the corners had met, now there was a swirling center, its centripetal force racing from quadrant to quadrant in ever-widening circles, picking up ideas and people from each, sweeping them into the center, mixing them there, and then spewing them forth into a new way of being Christian, into a new way of being Church.

The whole progression from distinct corners to a gathering center was precisely and exactly what sociologists and observers of religion had predicted would happen. The fact that the emerging pattern was following a predictable trajectory did not at first seem to inform most established churches and their governing bodies, however. What they saw, by and large and only at first, was a generational issue: the young were leaving as the young always do, as the boomers had done and the Gen-Xers after them. This was just some of those recalcitrant Gen-Xers mixed with the Millennials and not really doing anything much more significant than kicking up their theological heels a bit. They would come to their senses and come home to Mother Church under whatever defining adjectives or surnames she might live.

The error in this assessment—and as an assessment it did not last long—is that it failed to take into account the rummage sale factor. It failed to understand that we had slipped our moorings, at least temporarily. As a whole culture, as a social unit, we had at last become truly post-modern, post-denominational, post-rational, post-Enlightenment, post-literate, post-almost everything else that only a century before we had been, including post-Christendom. And these emergents, whose numbers increasingly included the white-haired as well as the young, could now use the term inherited church to name the goods being placed on the rummage sale table. Inherited church was that from which they had come and to which they, literally, now had no means of returning, let alone any desire at all to do so.

Backlash

Whenever there is so cataclysmic a break as is the rupture between modernity and postmodernity or, to put it in religious terms, between inherited church and emergent church, there is inevitably a backlash. Dramatic change is perceived as a threat to the status quo, primarily because it is. There must be a reaction in response. The codification of fundamentalism in the early twentieth century was arguably the earliest of the clearly demarcated reactions to the cultural and social changes out of which the Great Emergence is rising. There have been innumerable others since, and there undoubtedly are untold numbers still to come before all is said and done. But reaction is not in and of itself a destructive or even a malignant thing.

As scholars and commentators began to build and then adapt the quadrant way of describing and predicting a course for North American Christianity, they postulated that somewhere between 9 and 13 percent of those Christians natal to each quadrant would push back violently against the gathering force or pull of the center. At that point, the diagram came to look like this:

What commentators predicted, in other words, was that within each quadrant there would be congregations or ecclesial units and/or individuals who would aggressively dedicate themselves and their resources to reversing all the changes that had enabled, and were continuing to enable, the center and the emergence taking place there. Perhaps the most vivid example of this process, and certainly the one most often covered by the media, has occurred within the Episcopal Church in the United States where the ordination of an openly homosexual bishop forced the issue of sola scriptura, scriptura sola into the position of becoming a clear line in the sand. Choosing sides was unavoidable.[17]

This same process is, of course, occurring in all four quadrants, though just not quite as publicly. In the Social Justice quadrant, for example, the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America (but note well, not Presbyterianism per se) is suffering great losses as North American Presbyterianism splinters into various pieces. Entities like the American Presbyterian Church, the Orthodox Presbyterians, the Bible Presbyterians, the Evangelical Presbyterians, the Presbyterian Church in America, etc., etc. are shirring away as faithful, Reformation Christians struggle to find their balance again by dropping back to ideas and tenets that were their birthright. And thus it goes, each quadrant developing, in its upper and outer corner, a numerically minor, but psychologically significant configuration of reactionists or purists, again depending on who is doing the naming.

The quadrilateral that grew to cruciform shape with a centripetal center now takes on a different presentation. It looks more like the sketch of a stylized and perfectly centered flower, set off by a surround of petals and leaves. That is not a bad image. In fact, it is so compelling that what once was a quadrilateral sometimes is referred to now as a rose instead, or as the rose; and increasingly as “the new rose.” The rose itself was the chosen symbol of the Great Reformation, the means by which early protesters could safely signal their allegiances. There is, therefore, a kind of sweet continuity in having a new rose for a new time. That image, however sweet, is not perhaps as apt as one might wish in one respect, though. In point of fact, the more realistic imaging of what the reacting outer corners have added is verbal and nautical rather than visual and aesthetic. That is, one is better served by thinking once more of that cable of meaning and of the small boat it connects to the immense dock.

No ship, even a tethered one, can stay safely afloat and in place unless it has some ballast to hold its courses against those of the rocky sea it sits in. Thus, while ballast is neither an attractive word or an appealing concept, it enjoys the countering advantages of inestimable importance and absolute usefulness. In the Great Emergence, reacting Christians are the ballast. However unattractive they may seem to be to other of their fellow Christians and however unattractive nonreacting Christians may seem to be to them, the small, outer percentage is the Great Emergence’s ballast; and its function is as necessary and central to the success of this upheaval as is any other part of it. If the boat is not to tip and swamp, the ballast that forestalls too hasty a set of movements in a stormy sea must be there. One of the great dangers of what North America is going through is that some of her Christians, of whatever stripe, may cease to honor and accept the necessary function of all her Christians.

The Surrounding Currents

If observers can assign a rough percentage to the outer corners of each quadrant, can they do something similar with the rest of the rose? The answer is yes, more or less; but doing so will destroy the visual image of a flower.

How many emergent and emerging Christians are there right now in North America? Who knows? The truth, in fact, is that nobody is exactly sure who should and should not be labeled as an “emergent” or “emerging.” There is, instead, a spectrum or kind of sliding scale out from the center of the quadrilateral into a widening ring of circles. To set those circles in place on the map, we have to return to the quadrilateral and re-sketch it as in the following illustration.

While no observer is willing to say emphatically just how many North American Christians are definitively emergent at the moment, it is not unreasonable to assume that by the time the Great Emergence has reached maturity, about 60 percent of practicing American Christians will be emergent or some clear variant thereof. If that be a fair estimate, then there should be a remaining 30 or 35 percent of American Christians, give or take a few points, who are neither reacters nor emergers. What can one know about them? A good deal, actually.

This illustration is not drawn to scale; in actuality, the outer circles constitute only about a third of what North American Christianity may look like in the near future.

It would seem that what is happening presently is a kind of sorting out of that neither-fish-nor-fowl 30 or more percent into four definable groups that, like everything else in the Great Emergence, have fairly soft or interpenetrating boundary lines between them. The outermost channel or current—that which is farthest from the center and nearest to the reactionary, outer corners—is peopled by persuaded quadrant dwellers. Like those who have fallen heir to Grandpa’s old home place and who still like things just the way he had them, they see no need either to fight with the neighbors or to change the furniture. They will be Christian in an inherited church and know themselves to be both well served and good keepers of the family faith.

Like the reactionaries, these traditionalists lend stability to a faith in transition. Unlike the reactionaries, however, they will accommodate to, and serve as agents of, gradual change. Some of them will acquiesce to—maybe even assist in—the reconfiguration in their particular quadrants; and others, eventually, will participate in the realignments across sectarian lines that will become the adjusted Protestantism and amended Roman Catholicism of a “Counter-Emergence.”

What Butler Bass describes so aptly and well as “re-traditioning” Christians are, as a group, those just one ring nearer to the center. The re-traditionalists have also chosen to stay with their inherited church, but at the same time they energetically wish to make it more fully what it originally was. Like fond refurbishers who have inherited a much-loved and historic house, they seek to update the wiring, install better plumbing, and modernize the kitchen, but not in order to sell the house. Quite the contrary. They want to live in it for all of time, while simultaneously increasing its comfortableness, enhancing its natural beauty, and exposing its welcoming worth to all who pass by. In many ways, theirs is the most remarkable, arduous, and ultimately richest task of all.

Very close to the re-traditioners and, at times, almost indistinguishable from them are the Progressive Christians. One track nearer to the center, they feel its pull more; and while wanting to maintain their position in institutional Christianity, they want also to wrestle with what they see as the foolheartedness of holding on to dogma-based ideas and doctrinally restricted governance and praxis. Even while remaining well within their Reformation-based communions, they seek to adapt what they have to the realities of postmodernity.

They also are like householders who have inherited a house; but instead of being refurbishers, they are remodelers. For them, it makes more sense not to restore what one has by retouching its former beauty, but rather to simply open the whole place up a bit more. Progressives, accordingly, can with confidence remove some inconvenient walls, replace some drafty windows, and even knock off an obstructing porch or two without sensing any damage to the integrity of the family home. Thus, Eric Elnes, one of Progressive Christianity’s most dynamic and influential young leaders, once, half in jest, defined a Progressive as being “anyone who believes in loving God, neighbor, and self, and does not settle for ‘two out of three ain’t bad.’”[18]

Nearest to the emergent center, but still distinct from it, are the “hyphenateds,” their name being a bit tongue-in-cheek, of course. Tongue-in-cheek or not, though, they all do indeed bear either literal or implied hyphens as part of the names by which they call themselves. They are the Presby-mergents, the Metho-mergents, the Angli-mergents, the Luther-mergents, and so on. And in their hyphening of their self-assumed names, they recognize that theirs is probably the most schizophrenic of the encompassing circles. In some ways, however, it is also the most vibrant and colorful, exceeding at times even the vitality and rigor of the center itself.

Life on the margins has always been the most difficult and, at the same time, the one most imaginatively lived. Certainly that seems to be the situation with the hyphenateds, making it difficult to predict exactly where they will finally land. Will they remain within their quadrants and, like the traditionalists, re-traditioners, and progressives, become an informing part of what their respective quadrants or newly allied communions reconfigure into being? Or will they be drawn ever more forcefully into the swirling center, in the end leaving their natal communities entirely behind? Probably there will be no uniformity of resolution. Some will drop back, some will move to the center, some perhaps will stay as they are. Time will tell. But for the moment, the hyphenateds are also householders who, having fallen heir to Grandpa’s old home place, feel a compelling need to honor the land it sits upon and the trees that surround it, but no need to retain its structural shape. Imaginatively enough, though, while they may tear down the house, they will salvage some of the material out of which it was built and incorporate those honored bricks and columns, plinths and antique doors into the new thing they are building.

And that brings the discussion back to the center again, to that emerging, a-borning center which will be the next to hold pride of place in Christian history. Can we look from here and make out enough of the contours of that forming, but still amorphous, mass to predict what it is going to look like over the next two or three decades? Given what we know of it and what we know from historical patterns, can we extrapolate from there some useful sense of direction about where we are going? Yes . . . or at least to some extent . . . we can.