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Phyllis Tickle and Peter Rollins Discuss Emergence Christianity

Posted Dec 18, 10:38 PM | 5 comments | by Editor | Link

By Steve Knight:

Paraclete Press has just uploaded two incredible sets of short videos to YouTube. The first set is Phyllis Tickle and Peter Rollins discussing what Tickle calls emergence Christianity (to distinguish it from emerging and Emergent).

These videos are tremendous, so I’m posting them all here in their entirety, with some transcribed quotes/notes to go along with each.

Phyllis Tickle and Peter Rollins
Discuss Emergence Christianity, Part 1

Phyllis Tickle: ”(There’s) a lot of feeling I think globally too about whether it’s time to get a different name, and I don’t think that’s going to happen.”

Phyllis Tickle: “This is a conversation right now. It’s got to grow up to be more than a conversation …”

Peter Rollins: “The whole emerging scene I think is more a condition than a position. ... First and foremost, it’s felt.”

Peter Rollins describes two of the “values” shared by those in “the emerging community”:

• “suspended space” — “We try to create a space in our week, a liturgical hour, where there’s neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, Republican nor Democrat, employed nor unemployed, liberal nor conservative; where we can encounter each other at a deeper level than our mere affirmations. Not because they’re not important, but because we need to have a place where we can encounter each other at a deeper level.”


• “donut structure” — “I love the idea of a community that has no center. The center is voided. The center is where God is. And we practice relational tithing and relational pastoring. ... We call this the idea that the role of the leader is to refuse to be a leader, so as to push back and get a priesthood of all believers.”

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Phyllis Tickle and Peter Rollins
Discuss Emergence Christianity, Part 2

Peter Rollins: “I’m fascinated by the idea that there is a traumatic event in the biblical text, and that this is where the truth of the Bible is. ... The truth is in the rupture that creates those words and that gives life to those words.”

Peter Rollins: “For me, revelation (means) you can’t hear it unless it transforms your social existence, unless it changes you utterly and dynamically.”

Peter Rollins: “We’re the object, and God is the absolute subject. ... Not everything that exists can be objectified. If I take my life (for example), I can’t experience my life. It’s my life that opens me up to experience. I can’t see the light. It’s the light that allows me to see. And I say that God is so close and so intimate that we can’t reflect, it’s what we reflect from. ... When God enters the world, every object changes for us.”

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Phyllis Tickle and Peter Rollins
Discuss Emergence Christianity, Part 3

Phyllis Tickle: “I love, in this thing whatever it is that we can’t quite name, I love the playfulness, but I love the fact that the playfulness almost always leads to wisdom. That’s good playfulness in the way that kids play in order to arrive at some truth that is not a thing.”

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Phyllis Tickle and Peter Rollins
Discuss Emergence Christianity, Part 4

Peter Rollins: “What my concern is is that these emerging groups will be given a place within the Church to do their work, either as ‘youth ministry’ or ‘evangelistic ministry,’ and the Church as a whole won’t hear the message. This is a message, I think, to the whole Church …”

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Steve Knight is local organizer for the Charlotte Emergent Cohort and a member of the Coordinating Group for Emergent Village.

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