Tickle - Great Emergence, The: How Christianity Is Changing and Why

A word or two of explanation seems warranted, since what you are about to read has had a somewhat unusual story behind its presentation here.

While I began life as a teacherfirst of Latin to high school students, then as a college instructor, and finally as a college deanI have spent the bulk of my professional career in publishing. I left the academic world in 1971, in fact, to open and run a small Southern publishing house that, over the years, grew and morphed and grew again. All through those years, however, my yearning and urgency were toward my own writing; and in 1990 I left secular publishing to turn my full attention to living the life of the professional writer. But the late eighties and early nineties were also the years when religion was overtaking every other segment of Americas book publishing industry. By 1992, religion as a category of publishing was approaching triple-digit annual growth, and something had to be done by the larger industry to accommodate such massive change.

Publishers Weekly is the trade journal of the book publishing industry in the English language; but prior to 1992, it had not had a religion department for, truth be told, none had been needed. When the tsunami came that year, however, the journal had no choice other than to establish such a department, and quickly. Happily, for me anyway, I knew publishing from years of experience in the industry, I was a devout and observant member of the worlds largest religion, and I was free, more or less.

When Publishers Weekly called, I was startled at first. Most people who think they have the rest of their lives mapped out, only to discover otherwise, are startled, I suppose. But in due time and after further conversation, I was intrigued, came out of my self-imposed retirement-to-write stance, and went to New York to create out of whole cloth something that had never been before, and do it immediately. My training in religion is, as a result, not in any way formal. Rather, I became a student of religion by being cast dead center of the maelstrom and having to learn to swim right there and right then.

For religion books to get to the general readers who were ravenous for them, religion publishers had to be merged into secular media and secular retail book outlets. The industrys trade journal was the logical forum for the transfer of the data and information required to effect such an integration of the niche into the general market. Many secular publishing houses, for their part, had never done much, if any, religion publishing. Suddenly, however, they had to have effective, accessible, and deadly accurate information about what was happening in American religion, why it was happening, what to publish that would feed the needs thus identified, and what was likely to come next. Again, the industrys journal was the immediately obvious place for that transfer of data.

Over the years of that exchange, I changed too, of course. I became what is called a public intellectual or, in my old haunts as an academic, would have been called a scholar without portfolio. What those terms mean is that I was in a field where there were not yet programs for formal training. I was, to use the more common expression, receiving on-the-job training in spades. I was being transformed into a sociologist of religion as it is commercially applied; I was learning to see religion and its patterns as they could be tracked and validated in sales figures and book subcategories and title/format flow as well as in more traditional demographic studies. I also (for I shall always be an academic) began to read and study what scholars had said, and were saying, about religion both now and in other times of upheaval and flux. Always, obviously, I read through the lens of my own professional obligations at Publishers Weekly and in terms of my own industrys stated expectations of what their trade journal should provide; but I also learned far more than what was immediately applicable to publishing needs and purposes.

As a Christian, I became increasingly persuaded that what Publishers Weekly had taught me or had allowed me to learn had a greater place in the Christian community at large. Accordingly, I resigned my post at the journal and began a whole new life of talking to peopleboth lay and ordainedaround the country about what it is that is happening to us just now, and why, and to what probable result. The book you are about to read is, in essence, a hard copy at last of what those lectures and speeches and interviews have been about.

One of the great joys for me in writing this book has, in fact, been the realization that at last I am being given the opportunity to assemble into one coherent, narrative whole what I have been delivering in pieces and parts for the last several years. I am grateful for that gift, just as I shall remain always grateful to those of you who come to share with me here this particular overview of the Great Emergence through which we are presently living.