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Phyllis Tickle's idea that Christianity has entered the stage of "rummage sale" in its history has a funny resonance when reading stories like this one. I wonder what kind of rummage will appear at that sale?
It's hard to read stories like this and not feel some schadenfreude. For years, megachurches have offered an informal and occasionally overt critique of other churches, as if to say: "we megachurches are the future (or the present). You all will accomplish nothing like we do." I've always wondered if, over time, they would turn out to be exactly what they look like, namely, churches, and therefore subject to all the fits and starts of economy and attendance and soccer and a commercialized public. Seeing one of the original megachurches run itself 55 million in debt seems like exactly the kind of evidence I thought might one day appear. The head pastor's claim that God has led them to be 55 million in debt, and then write it off through bankruptcy seems to me a little, um, ... well, let's just say that praising the Divine for your poor business decisions, while leaping to place red-tape in front of you to protect you from creditors, seems ridiculous as a theology.
So, if Tickle is right and we are in The Great Emergence, rummage sale and rebirth of our faith tradition, what does that look like? What does that mean? Certainly, and I think this is important to say, it may mean that some of what's going to happen is what we might class as 'material rummage sales,' like the one that comes when you go belly up. One way to answer the question, and perhaps the best, is to attend one of the quote/unquote "emergent" groups, perhaps even of our particular denomination. The future may indeed be mystic, practical, life-commitment-oriented, down-to-earth, and afraid of real estate
But more and more, I think the future might still be being written even more radically than 'emergence' language might lead us to believe. In part, as someone with an academic bent, I think this is because Tickle's suggestion that history moves in 500 year increments is terrible and untrue--I'm not much for idealistic stages of history, and something about the very idea of 'stages of history' smacks exactly counter to the sense I have of postmodernism and emergent church, two concepts inevitably bound together. But more, what if, in fact, the future is not always knowable from the past?
I wonder if the metaphor for the 'emergence' should be part rummage sale, sure. But shouldn't it have a counter-metaphor, one that doesn't involve consumerism, materiality, modernist stages of history, and an eternal-return-of-the-same as necessary parts of the metaphor? Perhaps we need a metaphor like that of Saint Francis, stripping naked before his father in refusal of his birthright, and wandering into the forest with only a sense of vocation, one that that said "this past life ain't it"?
