Chapter 1: Rummage Sales
[1]. See in particular her The Practicing Congregation (Herndon, VA: The Alban Institute, 2004) and, with Joseph Stewart-Sicking, her From Nomads to Pilgrims: Stories from Practicing Congregations (Herndon, VA: The Alban Institute, 2006).
[2]. The Great Transformation: The Beginning of Our Religious Traditions (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006).
Chapter 2: Cable of Meaning
[3]. Corporeality’s active presence in religion is also the reason why doctrinal differences like those surrounding homosexuality, for example, are more honestly and effectively dealt with as corporeal rather than as moral issues.
Chapter 3: The Great Reformation
[4]. The Reformation: A History, which was published in the United States in 2004 by Viking, immediately comes to mind here. Magnificent in its scope and in the beauty of its sympathetic attention to detail, The Reformation was written by Diarmaid MacCulloch, professor of the history of the Church at Oxford and a fellow of the British Academy. It is now generally regarded as one of the great works of historical scholarship. MacCulloch dates the end of the peri-Reformation and the beginning of the Great Reformation from the late 1400s.
[5]. It would be another century, though, before far and away the greatest killer in Europe’s history was finally worn down more than defeated. One of the oddities of our cyclical upheavals is that they have always been accompanied by some great, generalized, human illness. Labeled by historians as “pandemics,” there had been only three recorded ones prior to our own time. The first occurred in the fifth and sixth centuries, the second between the eighth and fourteenth. The third was the devouring distress most commonly known to us as the Black Death.
Like our own contemporary struggle with HIV-AIDS (which is now being labeled as a fourth pandemic by some authorities) but many, many times more virulent, the Black Death was rampant across the known world during all the years of the entire Great Reformation from peri- to post-. By 1340 it had penetrated Europe and cannot really be said to have subsided until 1771 when the Great Plague of Moscow appears to have been its culmination. In those four hundred-plus years, it would kill over seventy-five million people in Europe alone, the worldwide toll being unknown.
The result of such devastation and human vulnerability was—and inevitably always is—a generalized reconsideration of the efficacy of the Church and the worth of resources extended to it. Likewise, there were and always are shifts in the popular as well as clerical understanding about the purposes of religion in general and of its temporal rewards in particular. Whether the recurrence of pandemics simultaneously with the recurrence of ecclesial upheavals is pure coincidence or whether, as some would have it, there is some other connection is for a later and more adequately informed time to determine. At the moment, all that can be said is that there is a co-occurrence between history’s pandemics and our times of re-formation.
[6]. One need only watch the creative struggles of Palestrina, the great Roman composer of the sixteenth century (ca. 1526–94), to see the power of this shift at work. As the Roman Church went through its time of re-traditioning in the Counter-Reformation, one of the principles laid down by the Council of Trent was indeed a severe ban on the polyphonic treatment of sacred texts that had previously characterized the Roman liturgy. Palestrina is often hailed today, as he was in his own time, as the savior of “Church” music, however; for it was Palestrina who managed to create such great polyphonic masterworks—see, for example, his Missa Papae Marcelli or “Pope Marcellus Mass”—that their aesthetic impact overrode the anathema of their not being semantically accessible. On the other hand, one has only to look at the collected works of Monteverdi (1567–1643), ordained Roman priest and widely acknowledged creator or father of modern music, to expose the broader and opposite impact of having a people’s music in holy space. And it was Gutenberg’s press that enabled the spread of those Protestant hymns that even the great Palestrina could not entirely counter and of the operas and madrigals by which the great Monteverdi later spoke his homilies to a re-traditioning Church.
Chapter 4: Questions of Re-formation
[7]. It should be noted here, just as an aside, that theologians do not use quite so disparaging a tone in dealing with the consequences of Descartes’ theories of God. Descartes thought that God had to exist and that His existence could be proved simply because he—or any one of us—contained the idea of God and of perfections of beingness that are qualities of God and could only come into us from Him. Labeled as such or not, this argument likewise seems now to be somewhere between ludicrous and dauntingly cerebral.
[8]. The Great Emergence, its questions, and its causes are being treated here, of course, as a Christian phenomenon, and primarily in terms of North American Christianity. That focusing of the lens should not be interpreted as meaning that North American Judaism has not undergone the same shifts and emerged with many of the same questions and analogous results, because it has. Likewise, Western Christianity in general, as we have already noted, has shared many of the same burdens and joys as has North American Christianity, though the two are culturally distinct enough to justify not including both here.
Chapter 5: The Century of Emergence
[9]. There is perhaps no more accessible or informative treatment of the cultural impact of Heisenberg’s physics than David Lindley’s Uncertainty—Einstein, Heisenberg, Bohr, and the Struggle for the Soul of Science (Doubleday, 2007). It should be required reading for every North American Christian who wants to grasp fully what the Great Emergence stands in juxtaposition to.
[10]. In general, Charismatic Christians, whose form of belief and worship came up out of Pentecostalism, do not like to be placed in the same category, or even the same sentence, with those from whom they have separated. In respect for that concern, but in recognition of the fact that the similarities are greater than the differences in terms of ecclesial implications, the Pew Foundation in 2006 began to refer to both bodies under the overarching name of “Renewalists,” a title which we will use throughout the rest of this volume.
[11]. The advent of Buddhism into popular culture had been preceded by the introduction into this country of Theosophy and the work of Madame Helene Blavatsky. Theosophy, which never commanded the general imagination, drew heavily on Eastern theory and particularly on Hindu thought. Despite the fact that it was “spiritual,” it nonetheless organized itself and conceived of itself as a religion. Because its adherents were often men and women of high intellectual, cultural, and/or social standing, however, the principles of Theosophy enjoyed a cachet of respectability that in turn helped break ground for myriad strands of Eastern thought and, many observers would say, even for the New Age and Age of Aquarius excitement of popular spirituality during the latter half of the twentieth century.
[12]. In point of fact, there were as many or more welded seams on gunboats as there were riveted ones on planes; and briefly we called Mrs. Johnny by the name of Wendy the Welder. The drama of throwing rivets triumphed, however, and Wendy lost pride of place to Rosie in our patriotic affections.
[13]. Those who wish to explore this point and its implications in greater detail can find a feast of information and insight in Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know by Stephen Prothero (HarperOne, 2007).
Chapter 6: The Gathering Center
[14]. Paul Raushenbusch, ed., Christianity and the Social Crisis in the 21st Century: The Classic That Woke Up the Church (New York: HarperOne, 2007), 40. Walter Rauschenbusch’s great classic, Christianity and the Social Crisis, was re-released in 2007 in a centennial edition edited by his great-grandson, Paul Raushenbush, and with accompanying essays and commentary by eight contemporary scholars.
[15]. Every honest writer, especially one with any academic experience at all, knows the tension inherent in talking about work that has no one, single, footnotable originator to whom credit can be given. Yet, and at the same time, when the writer has himself or herself been one of the commentators who has refined, amended, and updated an evolving concept, one can hardly disavow the result. Accordingly, what is right and correct here and in the rest of this volume is hardly of my own creation, though much of its adaptation is. What proves to have been in error, I will take responsibility for.
[16]. The earliest presentations of the shift away from Protestantism as it is traditionally defined presented as “independent” churches or as “community” churches or as “interdenominational” churches. By whatever name one chooses to call them, they all, by and large, were and still are hybrids. In matters so fundamental as their very composition, they eschew Protestantism, their theater seats being filled at every service by believers from every part of the Christian spectrum—Roman Catholic to Assemblies of God and back again. In point of fact, the membership of a community church today often draws about a quarter of its members from each of the quadrants.
Because, however, the initial energy of the gathering center was evangelical in origin, these early independent or interdenominational churches—for example, Lakewood Church in Houston (founded 1959) or Willow Creek just outside Chicago in South Barrington (founded 1975)—were more evangelical than emergent. Their evangelicalism did indeed jump the old barriers of sectarian creeds, but it retained the fervor of midcentury Protestantism’s belief in an all-encompassing, all-providing institution. It retained as well the central core of evangelism, sola scriptura, scriptura sola.
In times of enormous and apparently chaotic change, the security of a drop-back position is almost irresistible; and sola scriptura was the ultimate in drop-back positions or even is just plain, simple retreat from indecipherable chatter. The megachurch phenomenon is the result and can legitimately be parsed as evangelicalism’s first institutionalized response to the force of the Great Emergence.
[17]. It would appear that the predictions of 9 to 13 percent in reactionary movement is a bit high, at least in this case. Current estimates of the percentage of Episcopalian parishes, bishops, and dioceses that will eventually break away from the national church and align themselves with more traditional forms of Anglicanism is going to come in at around 7 percent. What cannot yet be predicted is the global implications and repercussions of all this, for international considerations lie outside the purview of this discussion and schematic.
[18]. In a personal conversation with the author in 2007 and used with permission. Elnes’s The Phoenix Affirmations (Jossey-Bass, 2006) stands today as the clearest, most articulate presentation of Progressive Christianity.
Chapter 7: The Way Ahead
[19]. Since about 2004, there has been a still-small, but perhaps growing divergence within the ranks of those who call themselves center-dwellers. For that reason, this overview has frequently used the somewhat awkward phrase, “emergent and emerging” Christians to indicate that the two are not quite the same thing and may not ever come to be of one mind just as was true, for example, with the Reforming, Confessing, and Professing strands of the Great Reformation.
The principal point of the differences between contemporary emergents and emergings is, as one might suspect, in the orthonomy/theonomy conflict. Emergents, associated with and led by Christians like Brian McLaren, Tony Jones, Doug Pagitt, etc., would put more emphasis on orthonomy than on theonomy, were they forced to choose between, rather than integrate, the two. Emerging Christians, whose most visible and influential leaders are Dan Kimball and Erwin McManus, tend toward the theonomy side of things, finding it increasingly difficult to occupy the same theological ground as do emergents.
[20]. To more fully appreciate the nuances and radical comprehensiveness of these distinctions, the reader may want to see Brian McLaren’s Everything Must Change (Thomas Nelson, 2007) or visit McLaren’s related website.
[21]. Miller, a voluminous writer, but a careful and consistent observer, made this point in essentially these same words many, many times. The form quoted here is taken from Thunderstruck—A Truck Stop for the Soul, a website exemplary of where emergence as a conversation has for years been taking place. Readers who prefer their sources to be more traditional ones may want to look at Miller’s bibliography. He introduces his Reinventing American Protestantism: Christianity in the New Millennium, for instance, with the words, “A revolution is transforming American Protestantism . . .” (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 1.
[22]. Email to author from Chuck Smith Jr., March 19, 2008.
[23]. While staunchly refusing to be a denomination or to take on the apparatus of traditionally institutionalized church, the Association does have “overseers” who exercise something very close to episcopal oversight. It maintains as well a central office of sorts and convenes its pastors from time to time for discernment, prayer, instruction, and, to some limited extent, matters of Association business; yet it is entrepreneurial in governance at the congregational level, is egalitarian to a fault, regards itself as non-creedal, and uses “tribal” as an adjective of choice for describing its singular form of group affinity and affections.
[24]. Doug Pagitt, founding pastor of Solomon’s Porch in Minneapolis and one of emergent Christianity’s most influential leaders and brilliant thinkers, makes a spirited and detailed presentation of this whole area of concern in his A Christianity Worth Believing (Jossey-Bass, 2008).
[25]. In the same way that Martin Luther became the symbolic leader and spokesman for the Great Reformation, so too has Brian McLaren become the symbolic leader and spokesman for the Great Emergence. His 2005 volume, A Generous Orthodoxy (Zondervan) is both an analog to Luther’s ninety-five theses and also a clearly stated overview of many of the parts of post-Constantinian Christian theology that are now undergoing reconsideration.
[26]. If such should indeed happen, then there is no overstatement or inflation in saying that the Great Emergence is not only a semi-millennial upheaval, but also a bi-millennial phenomenon. As many readers may know, Medieval mystics like Joachim of Fiore would regard that development as nothing less than prophetic fulfillment, inasmuch as they believed history to be divided into bi-millennial units. For them, from the beginning to the birth of Christ was the two thousand years of primary emphasis on God the Father. From the coming of Christ to 2000 was to be the two thousand years of primary emphasis on God the Son. From 2000 CE to 4000 CE would be the two thousand years of the primacy in worship and in human affairs of God the Spirit. To complete the biblical scheme of seven millennia, the era from 4000 to 5000 CE will be the consummate and glorious union of all three parts of the Godhead within space/time.
Study Guide Part 1: The Great Emergence: What Is It?
[27]. For a brilliant and concise overview of this, see Beyond Liberalism and Fundamentalism by Nancey Murphy.
[28]. Brian McLaren’s A Generous Orthodoxy describes theology not as systematic, but as a cohesive summation of multiple traditions through which a new kind of Christianity emerges.
Study Guide Part 2: The Great Emergence: How Did It Come to Be?
[29]. See p. 46.
[30]. See p. 73.
[31]. See p. 87.
[32]. See p. 107.
[33]. See p. 96.
Study Guide Part 3: The Great Emergence: Where Is It Going?
[34]. See p. 135.
[35]. Ibid.
[36]. See p. 134.
[37]. This term has come into wide use through Brian McLaren’s book of the same title, which aptly and beautifully describes the kind of ecclesial collaboration that will likely become a hallmark of Great Emergence Christianity.
[38]. See p. 138.
[39]. See p. 123.
[40]. See p. 151.
[41]. If you find this interesting, you may enjoy reading The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations by Ori Brafman and Rod A. Beckstrom (New York: Portfolio/Penguin, 2006); and Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams (New York: Portfolio/Penguin, 2008).
[42]. See p. 153.
[43]. See p. 152.
[44]. Ibid.