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By Root 1474 0

the 1980s and 1990s, conservative Evangelicals could contrast their growth statistics with the decline of their “liberal” Christian counterparts. They frequently suggested that their theological and socioeconomic conservatism was the secret to their statistical success. But in the first decade of the new millennium, Evangelicals discovered that their trend lines were turning south; they too were losing their younger generations.8 And in almost all cases, their growth rates, excluding immigrants, had either slowed, stopped, or reversed. Youth workers began feeling the pain first, and soon so did faculty and staff at Christian colleges and universities, as did workers in parachurch ministries and mission agencies, with church planters and pastors and priests in local churches not far behind.9 As time went on administrators and leaders in denominations began seeing the writing on their office walls too.

I continued to write about the church’s struggles in the postmodern transition, and two of my books, released in the early and mid 2000s, seemed to strike a special chord. A New Kind of Christian tried to define and describe the problem through a semifictional (and semiauto-biographical) story about a pastor whose faith was falling apart on him. It suggested that the Christian faith would need to disembed from the paradigm of modernity and experience something akin to a total make-over or rebirth in a postmodern context. A Generous Orthodoxy tried to be more constructive, describing what a postliberal, postconservative, postsectarian, and postmodern approach to Christian faith might look and feel like.

Along with my other books, these two in particular were being discussed in reading groups, seminary classes, conferences, and retreats. As a result, I began receiving speaking invitations from many different denominations both in North America and around the world. Christian leaders in Europe, Asia, Latin America, and Africa, I discovered, were experiencing similar kinds of struggles, and many of them were far ahead of us in the United States in realizing that a defining moment had come, a moment of deep shift, a moment in which a new kind of Christianity needed to be born.

So I was certainly not alone addressing this moment of crisis and opportunity. Many voices arose, like mine, from Evangelical backgrounds, but parallel conversations were emerging among mainline Protestants and Roman Catholics, and Eastern Orthodox thinkers were cautiously joining conversations in a few places as well. Two recent books, in my opinion, have contributed to the dialogue in an especially helpful way. As the former religion editor for Publisher’s Weekly, Phyllis Tickle was well-placed to observe what was happening in the American religious landscape. Born Presbyterian and an active Episcopalian in her adult life, Phyllis proposed in The Great Emergence that every five hundred years or so the Christian faith holds a “rummage sale.” It sorts through all that it has accumulated over recent centuries. What feels like extra baggage it sends to the recycling center, and what feels like essential travel gear it preserves for the future, thus opening a new chapter in Christian history. This kind of sorting process had occurred with the Great Collapse of the Roman Empire (around 500 CE), the Great Schism (around 1000), and the Great Reformation (around 1500). And now, she proposed, we are in the Great Emergence.

A leading theologian at Harvard Divinity School, an influential author, and an American Baptist, Harvey Cox made a similar assertion in The Future of Faith. Cox assessed history a little differently. He spoke of the first era of Christianity (from Jesus through about 300 CE) as the Age of Faith. That age had been characterized by diversity, energy, vitality, suffering, persecution, courage, and rapid growth. But that era ended when the Roman emperor Constantine converted (the story goes) to Christianity and Christianity then entered into a troubling alliance with his Roman Empire. In that alliance, unity of belief became politically useful—and