Author: Faithful abandoning church

The revolution has begun.

Quietly, maybe, but symptoms are bubbling up.

One is empty pews on Sunday morning, says author Phyllis Tickle.

Every mainline Christian denomination is declining in membership.

Though people are leaving church, they are keeping their faith, Tickle says, and that has lead to other symptoms.

They include Bible studies in bars, friends starting their own churches in houses, or congregations trying a smattering of everything —- music of the Middle Ages and the latest rock anthems, Saturday morning and Thursday night meetings. Pentecostals are adopting liturgy and Episcopalians are speaking in tongues.

“[The changes are] led by all those who wish to remain faithful, but feel something is not quite right in the church,” said Tickle, who will speak Sunday at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution Decatur Book Festival.

So they are questioning and experimenting, looking for a way to make church meaningful again. This new movement, which she refers to as emerging or emergent Christianity, will have as big an impact as the Reformation, Tickle predicts.

That was the 16th century upheaval when religious thinkers split open the feather pillow that had been the monolithic belief system of the Catholic Church. No one was able to put all the feathers back into the bag, and it changed the world —- generating new churches, igniting wars and helping push Protestants toward American shores.

How many churchgoers know about what she is talking about?

“It won’t be 10 percent right now,” she said. “But I would be floored if its not 20 percent next year. The restlessness now is almost palpable.”

It shows up in the symptoms mentioned and in the crowds, including many ministers, that pack rooms to hear her talk about it, she said.

Her book to be released Sept. 30, “The Great Emergence: How Christianity is Changing and Why,” (Baker Books, $17.99), explains what she believes she is seeing. Tickle, who for years was the expert on religion books at Publishers Weekly, is not the only scholar to notice.

Steve Hayner, a professor of church growth at Columbia Theological Seminary in Decatur, said: “We are watching with fascination, because we think this is going to change everything. But at the same time, it doesn’t quite feel like a revolution.”

The movement is loosely organized, and often quiet. It is made up of people who have gotten to know each other through word-of-mouth, on Internet sites or at conferences where writer-pastors such as Brian McLaren and Tony Jones speak.

The movement’s members are passionate and experimental, socially conscious and ecumenical, deeply devoted to early church disciplines, such a prayer, but they feel free to question and reinterpret long-held beliefs, he said.

Troy Bronsink, a former Presbyterian pastor who leads a strand of the Atlanta movement, describes some involved as “refugees from ecclesiological abuse.”

Discussion groups and the participants’ relationships create a safe space for those willing to question the religion they grew up with and think and talk about new ways to live out their faith, he said.

Like all change movements, it faces backlash from some Christians. Evangelical leaders such as Charles Colson say the trend-followers are relativists who surrender their theology to cultural norms.

Tickle said, “When somebody says they are relativists, I want to smack them upside their heads.”

One has to take belief seriously to question and reposition a faith so that it is meaningful in current culture, she said. And the critics should get used to these faithful who look back to the roots of the faith as well as lean into the future with it.

“Before it’s over, it’s going to be 60 percent of Christianity,” she predicted.

To learn more about emergent Christianity, visit

atlantaemergence.blogspot.com.

DECATUR BOOK FESTIVAL

Phyllis Tickle will speak at 5 p.m. Sunday in the Presbyterian Chapel on Church Street.