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I would commend The Great Emergence to anyone interested in understanding "how Christianity is changing and why." 

In succinct fashion, author Phyllis Tickle invites readers into a conversation that provides "an anchor point of understanding how Christianity fits into the large, sweeping scheme history."  This is a concise read that gives the reader sufficient historical background to understand the shaping of Christianity particular in North America and where it may be headed. 

Interestingly, Tickle's journey begins with the basic assumption or thesis that the world really has gone flat again and that every 500 years a transformative shift occurs in Christianity.  The author narrows her reflections and analysis with Christianity in North America and is not concerned with the whole of the religions in the world.

Tickle credits Anglican bishop, Reverend Mark Dyer with a leading and provocative statement.  Tickle says Dyer "famously observes from time to time that the only way to understand what is currently happening to us as twenty-first century Christians in North America is first to understand that about every five hundred years the church feels compelled to hold a giant rummage sale."

According to Tickle,Christianity groups have traditionally, by the end of the 1960's, fallen along the lines of a quadrilateral made up of the Liturgical Christians, Social Justice Christians, Renewalists and Conservatives.  The four quadrants are composed of mainline traditional denominations but points out how Christians, in particular, have a set of persuasions toward the form of a Christian practice named in a particular box.

Tickle cites a "gathering center" of currents that take place in this quadrilateral where the quadrants are understood in what one does religiously is more central to his or her understanding of Christian living than is what ne believes doctrinally.  Conversely, in other quadrants, for those Christians what one does doctrinally believes is more central than what one does religiously.

Quadrant emphasis can be viewed along ines by religious action or physicality called orthopraxy, an adaptation from the Greek for the concept of "right" or "correct" (ortho) practice (praxis).

Tickle says that new groups of reactionaries can be broken into "surrounding currents" of the gathering center is at work within the quadrilateral and expressed as Traditionalists, Re-Traditioning, Progressives, and Hyphenateds.

These reactionaries are like householders who have inherited a house.  Some of them are refurbishers while others are remodelers.  "Even while remaining well within their Reformation-based community, Progressive Christians seek to adapt what they have to the realities of postmodernity.  While the Traditionalists lend stability to a faith in transition and offer gradual change.  Re-traditionalists have chosen to stay with their inherited church but with a new energy wish to make it more fully what it originally was.

I know what you're thinking.  How can this be?  According to Tickle, a lay minister herself in the Anglican church, interprets Bishop Dyer's insight by saying, "the empowered structures of institutionalized Christianity, whatever they may be at that time, become an intolerable carapace that must be shattered in order that renewal and new growth may occur."

Tickle further contends that history shows us there are at least three consistent results or corollary events.

1.  A new, more vital form of Christianity does indeed emerge.
2.  The organized expression of Christianity is being reconstituted into a more pure and less ossified
  expression of its former self.
3.  That every time the incrustation of an overly established Christianity have been broken open, the faith has spread__and been spread__dramatically into new geographic and demographic areas thus increasing exponentially the range and depth of Christianity's reach as a result of its time of unease and distress.

Tickle references the birth of Protestantism as an example of the third result because "Protestantism not onlyestablished a new and powerful way of being Christian, but it also forced Roman Catholicism to make changes in its own structures and praxis.  As a result of both those changes, Christianity was spread over far more of the earth's territories than had ever been true in the past."

Reading this book has helped me to identify myself as a "Re-traditionalist."  I am willing to risk change but mostly in effort to help the Church recover its theological roots while at the same time being faithful to the Great Commission and relevant to our ever-changing world.  My praxis is for the Church to gain a grand refurbishment of the older one. 

Go purchase The Great Emergence.   You'll be glad you did. 

Barry is President and Founder of Ministry Indicators, www.ministryindicators.com a consulting group for churches ready for renaissance.  He also serves as a pastor/leadership consultant/coach for the Missouri Conference of United Methodists.