November 13 - 'Great Emergence' changing Christianity

Well-known writer and speaker Phyllis Tickle is bringing her message of an Emergent Church to Calgary. The Wisdom Centre and Christ Church Calgary are hosting the conference, which highlights Tickle's book The Great Emergence: How Christianity is Changing and Why.

"It's the Great Emergence. It's like the great Reformation or the great schism or whatever is the thing we are passing through right now. What Thomas Cahill calls a hinge of time or a hinge of history," says Tickle. "And we do it about every 500 years in western culture and we just happen to be doing it now.

"And in the same way that the Reformation had a religious component to it, Protestantism obviously came out of it. The Great Emergence has a religious component to it."

The Wisdom Centre was launched by the Anglican Parish of St. Lawrence in Calgary in 2006. "The Wisdom Centre was -- and continues to be -- inspired by the realization that traditional religion does not meet people's spiritual needs. Since its inception, the Wisdom Centre has cast a wide net and welcomes all that embrace a path to the divine through spiritual practice," says its website.

"There are certain commonalities among Emergence Christians; . . . they share a sense of the communal. They are deeply trinitarian in a way that western Christianity has not been for 1,000 years. They're definitely concerned about the standing doctrine of atonement. Their eschatology is entirely different from Protestantism. Their sense of social justice is entirely different from the standing Protestant or Roman Catholic point of view.