Becky Garrison: Who is the intended audience for The Great Emergence?
Phyllis Tickle: First, I hope Christians in established denominations find an explanation—and relief—for what’s happening. Every time I talk about a Great Emergence, someone says, “Oh, thank God I didn’t cause this thing.” It’s a social phenomenon and a repeated pattern. I hope emergents themselves will find it informing, and that’s the second part of the audience. The third group, the ones who excite me the most, are those who are already following emerging practices within established denominations and can’t quite figure out where the disconnect is.
What signs are there that we are in the midst of another reformation?
Superimpose everything happening to us on the Great Reformation of 1517. For example, lay the Internet on the printing press, the music Luther used to carry the theology, the science of Copernicus. The Reformation era was characterized by the rise of nation states; now we have the rise of globalization. We’ve gone from a cash-based society to an information society. The social unit has changed—the Protestant Reformation configuration of the nuclear family doesn’t occur now. We’ve gone from hierarchy to globalized networking, from the growth of the middle class to the death of the middle class.
What do you mean by a church “rummage sale”?
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