and supporting mission at the local level, where we all may learn how to follow Jesus into all of our neighborhoods.
Like those early followers of Christ, we find ourselves being scattered out of familiar and comfortable places and ways of being the church. Rather than be ruled by memory and consumed by fear, we can embrace this crisis, trusting that the Lord of Life will give us everything we need to spread the Gospel, proclaim the kingdom, and share the love of God. May God grant great joy in every city and neighborhood into which we go.
Respectfully submitted,
Susan Brown Snook, Tom Ferguson, Scott Gunn, Frank Logue, Brendan O’Sullivan-Hale, Steve Pankey, Adam Trambley
It was 1990 when God first called me to ministry. I was nineteen and still functionally agnostic; God called me before I knew God. I still remember rationalizing that it would be fine for me to follow this extremely unexpected call. I thought, “Ministry is a solid career path. The church is a stable institution. I can still have a respectable life.”
The twenty-first century wrecked every one of those assumptions. Ministry is not a solid career path when young seminarians are now advised to prepare for bivocational ministry.1 As buildings are sold and dioceses ponder merger, the church is not a particularly stable institution. In western Michigan, it’s still respectable to be a clergyperson. In much of the rest of America, telling someone you’re a pastor is almost guaranteed to get you at least an awkward pause in the conversation and occasionally a stopped conversation altogether.
Time for the Rummage Sale
As the church has grappled with these trends, no one has done more to give us a language and concepts for our time in history than Phyllis Tickle. Her book The Great Emergence named the extraordinary shifts taking place in our lifetimes. The catch phase that many took away from her work was the concept of the “rummage sale.” As she wrote (quoting the Rt. Rev. Mark Dyer), “the only way to understand what is currently happening to us as twenty-first century Christians in North America is first to understand that about every five hundred years the church feels compelled to hold a giant rummage sale.… [T]he empowered structures of institutionalized Christianity … become an intolerable carapace that must be shattered in order that renewal and new growth may occur.”2
When Phyllis began speaking about the “rummage sale” cycle, the church finally had usable language for the extraordinary shifts taking place in our time. We might not know why our institutions are in decline, but we know what a rummage sale is. Finding that metaphor was a necessary step toward a faithful response to our current situation.
But, helpful as it is, the rummage sale analogy is not the greatest gift that The Great Emergence provides us. With her book, Phyllis did her best to teach us that the changes we were experiencing weren’t about us. The decline of mainline America was part of a larger cultural shift. Nobody was controlling it, and it affected every single sector of society. Publishing and higher education were having their own rummage sales. The church wasn’t alone in this, and it wasn’t our fault. The time had simply come for us to reconsider, regroup, and seek renewal.
In The Great Emergence, Phyllis named the core function of religion as a meaning-making apparatus. She pointed out that the “cable of meaning” had broken as a result of the scientific discoveries of the 1800s—which had slowly but surely made their way into popular consciousness. She pointed to Darwin, Faraday, Freud, Jung, and Campbell. She cited Einstein and Schweitzer. She described the impact of radio, television, and the world wide web. She considered the shifts in family roles and the impact of women’s participation in the industrial economy’s paid workforce. She made it clear that the institutions of religion are being changed in our lifetimes because of a widespread cultural re-examination of fundamental principles of our society.
In a highly networked, technology-driven age, Phyllis told us, the institutions born in the age of Reformation—nation-states trading by means of a capitalist economy—are no longer secure in their authority. And neither is Protestant Christianity. As Thomas Friedman told us, The World Is Flat (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2005). Why would we expect the forms of our faith to survive as they once were? While everything changes around us, why would our religious institutions remain unchanged? The church is unique in society, but it isn’t that unique. Our message is eternal, but our structure is temporal.
In the decade since The Great Emergence was published, the trends that it describes have only continued. The rummage sale continues, and in fact has expanded. As white Americans come to grips with the killing of African-Americans at the hands of the police, it has become evident that our country’s foundational principles are tied up with the lie of white supremacy. The same virtual networks that create community untethered to place also enable the broadcast of news and opinion from the grassroots. Twitter enabled all of America to discover what was happening on the ground when police in Ferguson killed Mike Brown. As DeRay Mckesson, one of the lead social media broadcasters, said, “We didn’t discover injustice in August 2014. We did have a different set of tools.”3 That set of tools broke open a new set of questions that are of one piece with the rest of the Great Emergence. How can white Christians trust our churches when we know our ancestors in the faith—and the institutions they stewarded and we now inherit—were complicit in colonialism and slavery? How can we believe in a church that stood for oppression and violence?
Phyllis would tell us that this is all part of the rummage sale. Our era inherits a Christianity that is not only being rethought and reimagined, but also reconstituted incarnationally in our institutions. We can see that the former things are passing away; we are listening for what God is doing to bring forth new things. The church’s existence is not founded on buildings, endowments, jobs, or pension plans; the church’s existence is founded on the gift of God’s self: the Holy Spirit.
Phyllis Tickle isn’t the only person who chronicles the rise and fall of organizations. David K. Hurst is another notable thinker practically unknown to the American church. A business professor in Canada, his book Crisis & Renewal: Meeting the Challenge of Organizational Change (Harvard Business Review Press, 1995) is the other handbook to the Rummage Sale Era. It proposes a theory of organizational life that the church would do well to heed in these times.
From Crisis to Renewal: An Ecological Model
Hurst’s writing is not grounded in church history or theology; I doubt he intended it to be received by the church at all. (Christians will need to overlook the book’s dedication “to the Goddess.”) Nevertheless, the model for organizational renewal that Hurst proposes is grounded in natural systems, which themselves reveal the character of God. Hurst’s capacity to extrapolate usable organizational theory from enduring ecological principles makes his book required reading for the church today. Where most theories of organizational life begin with the birth of an organization and end with its death, Hurst’s model is an infinity loop in which organizational endings are simply precursors to new beginnings—if one is bold enough to take the path that leads from death to life.
I was introduced to David K. Hurst by Curt Bechler, an organizational consultant who arrived at the board meeting of my daughter’s Montessori daycare at about the same time I did. I was a new board member; he had been hired to help us get through the mess we were in. His first presentation was Hurst’s ecocycle model. As he drew the infinity loop on the board, he described the process of organizational birth, crisis, and renewal. (I didn’t record him speaking that day; what follows is my best recollection of his
