This is a short paper I wrote on missional community formation for the Transform Network.  I was trying to reframe the conversation around missional community.  You can find Part 1 here.

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The Great Emergence

Tickle also documented the idea of The Great Emergence, a process that occurs every 500 years that fundamentally shakes up the church. Tickle suggested a series of historical events began to expose many of the deeply held assumptions of each framing story.  Individuals began to re-examine and listen to not just their own assumptions, beliefs and practices but also those of the other categories as well.

Tickle described this exploration process as, “the cruciform.”

Some of those within each category begin to explore the practices and ideas of other framing stories.  For example, Conservatives began to explore the world of leading of the Spirit.  Renewalists began to explore the world of liturgy. Liturgicals began to explore the world of social justice, etc.  The traditional barriers were beginning to fade and virtually nothing was off limits.

Brian McLaren explored this tenuous process in his several of his works.  In A New Kind Of Christian trilogy. He offered the fictional narrative journey of what it meant to face a spiritual crisis by questioning one’s faith background, and even deconstruct it for the sake of one’s own faith.  What emerged was a more robust faith that revealed the underlying grace in the question process.

In A Generous Orthodoxy, McLaren made the radical claim of that he could comfortably live and flourish in every category at the same time, which questioned the hard and fast but unwritten boundaries of each category.  His conclusion was that each framing story had something to learn from each other.

Tickle called this exploration process, “the Rose”.  The center became gathering point for those re-examining their faith.

Tickle described this unique occurrence in history by stating, “the old, natal divisions were beginning to melt away, especially where their four corners met.” Tickle further defined the process inside each category.  The closer to the center the more likely the person was to shift towards a hyphenated approach. Individuals were beginning to find their faith expressions in multiple framing stories.

This exploration, deconstruction, and subsequent reconstruction process revealed the freedom to discover own one’s faith and to take responsibility for it.  To “emerge” was to take the risk to live in the tension of the question and seek out answers.

But the process also put it in conflict with one’s own original authority structures.  At the heart of the Emergence process was the underlining question, “Where is now our authority?”  To wander into other framing stories was to suggest that something was incomplete with the old one.  It revealed the tension that categories were fundamentally based on limited and often changing human interpretation.

This emergence process suggested the need for larger framing story, one that was inclusive of the rich history and expressions of each category but was anchored in something more robust than the limited human interpretation of right belief or practice.  What was needed was a framing story that was conscious of the origins of faith and provided a deeper basis for unity.