The Emergence Church(es)

Well, we have all safely arrived home from our 2012 Adult Retreat in Santa Fe, NM. I want to thank the Adult Retreat Committee, small group leaders, and the many, many others who helped us to have a great time in New Mexico. Special thanks to Stephanie Nash, Scott and Nancy Sharp, and Melanie Davis for the untold number of hours they put into making the weekend a real success. Well done, friends; well done.

And how ‘bout our Adult Retreat leader Phyllis Tickle. Phyllis has keen gifts for perception and analysis and a personality to pass it along. What a mind and what a spirit. Somebody said she is basically Book TV meets Molly Ivins!

For those who didn't go on the retreat, you will probably hear those who did coming back and talking about things like "emergence" or the "Great Emergence." I know this can sound like esoteric, in-the-club speak, but you already know what emergence is. You swim in it. It is the world you live in. And the Great Emergence is simply what the world has come to over the course of the last 150 years. As Phyllis said, the Great Emergence means the world you live in "ain't your great-granddaddy's world" and "there's no going back."

Here's a small sample of signs of emergence Phyllis gave us to consider:

- Technological information is doubling every 9 months 27 days.
- The average person will have five different careers in his or her lifetime.
- We live in a "glocal" world - "When Greece catches a cold the whole world catches pneumonia."
- In 1905, there were 8,000 cars in the US. Today, there are 8,000 in the parking lot. (Ok, that's an exaggeration.)
- When you pull your car into the driveway, you call on your cell phone for someone to help you bring in the groceries. (That's not an exaggeration!)

Again, as Phyllis said, this ain't our great-granddaddy's world. In fact, it's not my granddaddy's. And it may not even be your daddy's.

So, the question Phyllis has us asking is this: What will the "emergence church" look like in order to live in and speak meaningfully to this brave, new world? Perhaps in order to get at that question we might need to talk not about the emergence church, but rather emergence churches. Our great-granddaddy's church had a white steeple out up top, screwed-down pews inside, read from the KJV up front, and set women in the (at best, metaphorical) back. This was true pretty much regardless of whether your great-granddaddy was Baptist or Methodist, black or white, a city or country boy. The churches of the Great Emergence are going to be much more unique, particular, and contextualized.

Jesus said, "The Kingdom of Heaven is like a net that was thrown into the water and pulled in fish of all different kinds" (Matthew 13:47). The boat has always been a symbol for the Church universal. What we are now learning in this very different world is that the Church universal may actually be better symbolized not by one single boat, but by a multiplicity of different-sized boats, fishing with various sizes of nets, on extremely divergent bodies of water, in order to catch those fish of very different and many kinds.

So the question for Second B isn't so much, "What will the Emergence Church look like?" It is rather, "What is Second B going to look like in this Great Emergence?" In other words, what kind of boat are we going to need to be sailing?

I'll wade out into that water next week.