500-Year Seismic Shift

Roughly every 500 years, the Christian Church experiences a seismic shift - and it's right in the middle of one now, according to Phyllis Tickle, founding religion editor at Publisher's Weekly and speaker at the 2008 Associated Press convention in April. First there was the beginning of the monastic culture around 500 CE, then the split into eastern Orthodox and western Roman Catholic at the turn of the first millennium, and then the Protestant Reformation. Brian McLaren in A Generous Orthodoxy now calls this seismic shift the Great Emergence. Some 35% of all Christians today are "emergent," Ms. Tickle estimates. It's a group that includes people who attend house or community churches, including those who embrace neomonasticism. Protestantism will have to "reconfigure," she says. "You didn't cause the emergence; you're not going to stop it…We're not in the business of saving denominations. If we are, may God have mercy on us. We're here to create the Kingdom of God." [United Methodist Reporter, June 27, 2008]

Calling Us to Die?

I don't want my church to die. But if avoiding death is her priority, she'll never really live...We cannot ignore Jesus' call to share in his death so that we may share in his life. If we throw our resources into saving our lives, we'll still die. But if we give up our lives for the sake of following our Lord, we'll find a new and better life given back to us…Understand, I'm not suggesting that Methodism is or should be dead; only that by putting our commitment to live like Jesus above our own survival, we might find a life that's truer than the one we worry about losing. [The Rev. Eric Van Meter, campus minister, Wesley Foundation, Arkansas State University, Jonesboro, quoted in the United Methodist Reporter, July 25, 2008]