Are We Having A Rummage Sale?

The Great Emergence by Phyllis Tickle is one of the books I’m currently reading, and it is fascinating!

Tickle opens the book with the premise that roughly every 500 years the Christian Church goes through a great rummage sale of sorts, where “the empowered structures of institutionalized Christianity, whatever they may be at that time, become an intolerable carapace (a hardened shell) that must be shattered in order that renewal and new growth may occur.” (p. 16) She traces the history of these church-wide rummage sales this way:

16th Century — The Reformation led by Martin Luther and John Calvin

11th Century — The Great Schism between Eastern Orthodoxy and Roman Catholocism

6th Century — Pope Gregory the Great who helped formalize the monastic movement, where Western Christianity was held in trust during the dark ages.

1st Century — The birth of the Church and its movement out of Judiasm into the wider world.

Tickle believes that here in 21st Century North America the Church is already in the midst of the next great rummage sale; metaphorically cleaning out the attic, and the basement, and all those closets that no one ever opens any more, of all the things that are keeping the Church from being the kind of place it needs to be to tell people the Good News of Jesus Christ in this day and age.

When these every 500 years Church rummage sales happen, Tickle says there are always three consistent results: “First, a new, more vital form of Christianity does indeed emerge. Second, the organized expression of Christianity which up until then had been the dominant one is reconstituted into a more pure and less ossified expression of its former self. Third, every time the incrustations of an overly established Christianity have been broken open, the faith has spread — and been spread — dramatically into new geographic and demographic areas, thereby increasing exponentially the range and depth of Christianity’s reach as a result of its time of unease and distress.”

I am fascinated by Tickle’s premise and argument, and think she may be on to something. In my experience, churches collect so much physical and emotional rummage over time, that a periodic sale and time of letting go would be healthy and make for a lot less clutter!

I am heartened by two other points in the book. First, Tickle doesn’t beat up on the present day Church and Church members for allowing the Church to reach the point where a rummage sale is necessary. She sees the Church’s periodic need to let go and transform and re-emerge as a natural movement, very much like the movement we know in Jesus, from life to death to resurrection and new life! Second, Tickle believes that when the rummage sale is over, the existing Church will emerge stronger and healthier and even more faithful. We are people who live in hope that God is never done with us, that God is always at work within us and our Church. What a gift this hope is!

So, what do you think? Is it time for a rummage sale? Who is going to price everything?!

See you in worship this Sunday!!