In The Great Emergence, Phyllis named the core function of religion as a meaning-making apparatus. She pointed out that the “cable of meaning” had broken as a result of the scientific discoveries of the 1800s—which had slowly but surely made their way into popular consciousness. She pointed to Darwin, Faraday, Freud, Jung, and Campbell. She cited Einstein and Schweitzer. She described the impact of radio, television, and the world wide web. She considered the shifts in family roles and the impact of women’s participation in the industrial economy’s paid workforce. She made it clear that the institutions of religion are being changed in our lifetimes because of a widespread cultural re-examination of fundamental principles of our society.
In a highly networked, technology-driven age, Phyllis told us, the institutions born in the age of Reformation—nation-states trading by means of a capitalist economy—are no longer secure in their authority. And neither is Protestant Christianity. As Thomas Friedman told us, The World Is Flat (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2005). Why would we expect the forms of our faith to survive as they once were? While everything changes around us, why would our religious institutions remain unchanged? The church is unique in society, but it isn’t that unique. Our message is eternal, but our structure is temporal.
In the decade since The Great Emergence was published, the trends that it describes have only continued. The rummage sale continues, and in fact has expanded. As white Americans come to grips with the killing of African-Americans at the hands of the police, it has become evident that our country’s foundational principles are tied up with the lie of white supremacy. The same virtual networks that create community untethered to place also enable the broadcast of news and opinion from the grassroots. Twitter enabled all of America to discover what was happening on the ground when police in Ferguson killed Mike Brown. As DeRay Mckesson, one of the lead social media broadcasters, said, “We didn’t discover injustice in August 2014. We did have a different set of tools.”3 That set of tools broke open a new set of questions that are of one piece with the rest of the Great Emergence. How can white Christians trust our churches when we know our ancestors in the faith—and the institutions they stewarded and we now inherit—were complicit in colonialism and slavery? How can we believe in a church that stood for oppression and violence?
Phyllis would tell us that this is all part of the rummage sale. Our era inherits a Christianity that is not only being rethought and reimagined, but also reconstituted incarnationally in our institutions. We can see that the former things are passing away; we are listening for what God is doing to bring forth new things. The church’s existence is not founded on buildings, endowments, jobs, or pension plans; the church’s existence is founded on the gift of God’s self: the Holy Spirit.
Phyllis Tickle isn’t the only person who chronicles the rise and fall of organizations. David K. Hurst is another notable thinker practically unknown to the American church. A business professor in Canada, his book Crisis & Renewal: Meeting the Challenge of Organizational Change (Harvard Business Review Press, 1995) is the other handbook to the Rummage Sale Era. It proposes a theory of organizational life that the church would do well to heed in these times.
From Crisis to Renewal: An Ecological Model
Hurst’s writing is not grounded in church history or theology; I doubt he intended it to be received by the church at all. (Christians will need to overlook the book’s dedication “to the Goddess.”) Nevertheless, the model for organizational renewal that Hurst proposes is grounded in natural systems, which themselves reveal the character of God. Hurst’s capacity to extrapolate usable organizational theory from enduring ecological principles makes his book required reading for the church today. Where most theories of organizational life begin with the birth of an organization and end with its death, Hurst’s model is an infinity loop in which organizational endings are simply precursors to new beginnings—if one is bold enough to take the path that leads from death to life.
I was introduced to David K. Hurst by Curt Bechler, an organizational consultant who arrived at the board meeting of my daughter’s Montessori daycare at about the same time I did. I was a new board member; he had been hired to help us get through the mess we were in. His first presentation was Hurst’s ecocycle model. As he drew the infinity loop on the board, he described the process of organizational birth, crisis, and renewal. (I didn’t record him speaking that day; what follows is my best recollection of his words more than a decade after I first heard them.)4
“Say you want to start something new,” he began. “You can’t do it alone, so you recruit a couple of friends. They agree to work with you.” As he talked, he drew:
“But you can’t do anything until you know what you’re doing, so you spend some time getting organized. You meet together to get clear on your vision and your purpose. You do some deep dives into why you’re there together.”
“After a while it becomes evident that the work will go more smoothly if you have defined roles, so you figure out who does what. Your new organization begins, and starts to offer what you want to provide the public. Good news! The public likes it. You have created something that is accepted, embraced, and valued.”
“In fact, it’s so well accepted and highly valued that you need to do more of it. You have to scale up—and that means creating systems and processes and finding a way to welcome more people on board so you can get better and bigger at the thing you do. Now there aren’t just you and a couple of friends, there are departments and policies and procedures—and all of this is necessary for you to continue to provide this amazing and highly valued something at the scale that it is desired by others.”
“And then one day something happens. It might start out as something small. But there’s a shift. Instead of everything chugging along with continued external demand and continued internal development, things kind of level off. Then they do more than level off—they actually start to decline.”
“At first you can hardly believe it. The upward trend line is so strong and it continued for so long, surely this is just a temporary blip. Surely in a little bit, things will naturally reverse on their own. You don’t need to do anything different for now—just wait a bit and your life will be back to normal.”
“Except it doesn’t get back to normal. The decline continues. It more than continues, it actually accelerates. By this point it becomes clear that you need to change something. The only problem is, you don’t know what to change. You start trying things, different things, sometimes it seems like anything. (By the way, this is the point in the loop where some organizations just spiral out and die.)”
“And then, as you’re trying all these different things, one of them catches hold. Or maybe a few of them. They start out as small experiments, but they are small experiments that grow out of your existing values. And for some reason—you don’t even know why—now these are the things that resonate. Not the old things that you used to do, but these new things that are kind of like the old things but also somehow different. They are close enough to your core capacities that you can offer them; they are close enough to the desires of the wider public that people want them. And so you begin a whole new process of taking apart the systems and processes that you