I am almost done with reading The Great Emergence by Phyllis Tickle.  I heard her talk at Wild Goose Festival in June,  which provided us with a 30 minute summary of what’s in the book.

It seems that I am,  as I read into the “where is this thing going” final portion of the book,  I am thinking that what I saw coming early (and wrote about"* ) in the process of the “Internet revolution” as it relates to the church needs a  “Great Update”  only  about 18 years after I “discovered” the joys of “online community” with people in the church.

As with the talk at Wild Goose, this book by Tickle is an excellent history of prior movements/emergences/shifts  in Church history.   It occurred to me that my initial research on the impacts of online communication (as the early Internet was becoming public ) back in the mid 90’s has undergone quite the maturation process over the past 18 years.  And of course, during that time,  the change that has occurred on the Internet and World Wide Web has been constant and perhaps even overwhelming.

The “overwhelming” part of it is what I will attempt to lay hold of ,  and in that effort I have been somewhat inspired by the way in which Phyllis T. is able to articulate and illuminate the shifts  in thinking that have been occasioned by previous social and technological forces.  As communication explodes ,  carried to new heights (or other places)  by an explosion of Internet enabled applications,  the church has historically resisted and also gladly utilized the new channels. It resists because it fears the effects of those technologies on the institution as they perceive  it.  But they also utilize it in order  to keep their content sufficiently competitive,  although the jury is still out on what costs there might be in uncritically adopting the assumptions inherent in these new media.  The range of effects, I expect,  go for beyond the surface motivation of “spreading the Word”  (this rings familiar to the previous communications inventions where the evangelistic rationale encourages quick and unquestioning adoption.  This was true for the technology of writing,  of movable type,  of radio and TV.  The status and precedence and even the meaning of  “the Word” has undergone change,  as has the role of text itself.  )

I have  pulled out  and noted some quotations from The Great Emergence that I will use to further articulate the need I see for the church to be its  own most delicate and also harshest critic.  As we have done  with the behavioral and psychological sciences and practices in pastoral care,  we need to have the “analyst’s eye”  with regards to the effects and possible outcomes and the shaping of our hopes for this new medium (and getting “newer” almost constantly). 

I want to complete the final section of the book (the last 40 or so pages) which is beginning to ask the question : “Where is this Great Emergence GOING"?”  I expect that as Phyllis lays this out,  there will be several more  points and quotes which I will want to explore as  it relates to the GOALS or HOPES we in the church might envision for what kind of tools the Internet and mobile technology might become for us. 

*  My writing was for a Doctor of Ministry program I was working in at United Theological Seminary in 1993-97,  most all of that work being submitted and discussed online via Ecunet,  an online conferencing system on which several “mainline” folks had gathered and held both formal and informal discussions.  It had the same  kind of feel as “The Well”  (an online service introduced to me through Howard Rheingold’s seminal book about online communications “The Virtual Community”.  Phyllis Tickle was on Ecunet back then,  and contacted me about using some of my observations in her upcoming book “God in America”  (this can be found on pp. 146-147 within a chapter entitled “In the Palaces of Cyberspace”)   Phyllis seems attuned to the idea that the Internet  has made possible many of the conversations that have lent strength and distribution to the “Emergent theologizing” .