The Minister's Message

Every couple of months, I am asked to write a Minister's Message for the Coffeyville Journal. This morning the secretary of the First Baptist Church called to ask me to do an extra one because the minister of the First Christian Church has passed away over the weekend and he was scheduled for this next Sunday's message. I agreed. I had been wanting to share this message from my new book with my Christian brothers and sisters and this gave me the opportunity.

This is what I sent to the newspaper.

I have been reading a very interesting book lately. It is called "The Great Emergence...How Christianity is Changing and Why" The author is Phyllis Tickle, an internationally renowned expert on religion. She says this event is a monumental phenomenon in our world. This phenomenon has been slipping up on our world for decades. We know our world is changing rapidly in every way and those of us who are Christian and church goers in North America are aware that the Christian church as a movement has also been changing.

The Right Reverend Mark Dyer, an Anglican bishop, recently famously and humorously observed that every 500 years, the church feels compelled to have a "giant rummage sale". We are living near the end of one of those 500 year periods now. This should be psychologically very reassuring for most of us. He says every 500 years the empowered structures of institutionalized Christianity, whatever they may be at the time, become an intolerable carapace that must be shattered in order that renewal and new growth may occur.

History shows us that when that happens, at least three things occur: First: a new more vital form of Christianity does indeed emerge. Second: the organized expression of Christianity which up to then had been the dominant one, is reconstituted into a more pure and less ossified expression of it's former self. Third: The faith spreads dramatically into new geographic and demographic areas.

Five hundred years back from our present place in history, places us in the sixteenth century and into what is now being called, "The Great Reformation", which began around 1517. Another five hundred years back takes us to The Great Schism" in 1054, which divided the Roman Catholic Church and the Eastern Orthodox Church. Another five hundred years back takes us to the sixth century and the Fall of the Roman Empire and the time of Pope Gregory the Great, who saved Christianity from paganism by moving it firmly into monasticism that would protect, preserve and characterize it during the next five centuries. The next backward move five centurys, takes us to the first century where Christianity moved away from Judaism. In 70 CE the Temple would be destroyed and in 130 CE the Holy City would be permanently barred against Jewish blood even entering it. And between those two dates, much of the structure of the Christian Church as we know it was born.

And the most wonderful thing about it all is that when these schisms occur, both parts of the schism change for the better and grow. We have all had the experience at some time or another of changing churches or seen a church divide only to find that both sides of the division then improve and grow.

So, if these two experts are correct, and statistics seem to bear them out, these next few years will be exciting. Yes, Christianity as we have known it will change but that change will revitalize it and cause unprecedented growth.

I hope I am still around to see this happen.