What mattered was the people who came and went on those Tuesday nights had questions they wanted to ask about faith, about truth, about the Bible and about God, and they had a space where they could come and ask them. When they ran out of questions, they stopped meeting. A year later they reunited to mark the anniversary of what they had been doing and sometime after that, the milkpod burst and they began meeting in smaller groups.
Tickle gave the illustration of this emergence community to give
us a picture of how church is happening today outside our mainline congregations.
Explaining a cascade of sociological and historical
events
that have set the stage for “The Great Emergence”, Tickle was
challenging those
of us “in the business of religion” to listen for and address the hard
questions that people
ask. The questions aren't meant to tear down the Church we have known;
they are to get at which traditions carry something worthwhile – Living Water (John 4:10) – and which ones are like cracked cisterns that need to be thrown out.
Encouraging
leaders to designate a pastoral allowance that lets pastors go where people are
– whether that is a neighborhood bar or a coffee shop – Tickle argued that we need
to be reminded that our congregations and churches are not the kingdom of God, but we are called to serve the kingdom
of God and that means talking to whoever is looking at us, wherever they find us.
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