Author explores life of a trailblazer

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 13/10/2018 (2849 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

From the first time I interviewed Phyllis Tickle in 2009, until a couple months before she died on Sept. 22, 2015, we stayed in touch. She never failed to respond to my emails or phone calls.

She made me feel like not just a reporter, but a friend.

Apparently, I was not alone. According to Jon M. Sweeney in his new book, Phyllis Tickle: A Life, the prolific author and speaker “was a genius at friendship, able to communicate sincerity, warmth and affection to hundreds of people, one at a time, in such a way that many people — perhaps two or three hundred — may have, at any given time, regarded themselves as one of Phyllis Tickle’s best friends.”

Uncovering the private Phyllis Tickle is Sweeney’s goal, and he does it well. We learn about a woman who was deeply spiritual — she prayed faithfully six times a day, starting at 6 each morning.

He writes about how she and her husband, Sam, raised six children. We also learn of her grief following the death of an infant child; she cried for months when the baby died.

She was a gun owner, believing in the importance of the Second Amendment. A libertarian politically, Sweeney writes, she loved living on her rural property in Tennessee, secure in knowledge “they would have guns and privacy and would provide as much as possible for themselves.”

She may have spoken in tongues. Sweeney writes she “frequently heard Jesus speak to her” and occasionally felt God “was hovering over a place, signifying God’s blessing.”

She struggled with a difficult marriage, but never once considered divorce as an option for a Christian. “She was always faithful in a marriage that was sometimes unsatisfying and unfaithful to her,” Sweeney writes.

And although she was a trailblazer for women by taking leadership in areas dominated by men, she didn’t consider herself a feminist.

In addition to her private life, Sweeney also spends time talking about the public Tickle. This includes her years as the founding editor of the religion department for Publishers Weekly, and as a prolific author herself — she wrote more than three dozen books, including a number on prayer.

But it was The Great Emergence: How Christianity is Changing and Why, published in 2008, that garnered her the most attention later in her career.

In that groundbreaking book about the changes facing western Christianity today, she used the metaphor of a garage sale to describe the upheavals facing the church in the 21st century.

The last time the church had such a sale was the Great Reformation, when reformers like Martin Luther replaced the pope with a new source of authority — the Bible.

This time, she said, Christians are looking for new forms of authority, jettisoning things like institutional church structures, buildings and even the Reformation view of the Bible itself.

In Tickle’s view, this has been an ongoing process over time for things like slavery, women’s ordination and divorce. With each issue, Christians found ways to change their view on those subjects, and adapt their view of the Bible.

Now, she stated, came “the last playing piece” — the full rights and inclusion of LGBTTQ* people in the church.

“When it is resolved — and it most surely will be — the Reformation’s understanding of Scripture as it had been taught by Protestantism for almost five centuries will be dead,” she declared.

Tickle understood this battle would be “agonizing” for many Christians who had built their lives on a certain view of the Bible, and it would prompt fierce defensive attacks — she was called a heretic more than once.

Sweeney records one such episode in the book about her first visit to Winnipeg in 2009, writing that her presentation was met by “evangelicals protesting a wide range of what she was teaching, and what she wrote in The Great Emergence.”

What her critics didn’t know, he says, was she was “always more sympathetic” than they imagined “to the pain and discomfort Christians felt in the face of change rocking the churches, traditional doctrine and ways of being faithful.”

Sweeney writes that “people will debate for years to come whether Phyllis was an evangelist and catalyst for change in the American church, or simply a historian and sociologist telling of changes taking place.”

History, he says, “will tell whether or not she was correct in her reading of the signals and signs to identify a great emergence of Christianity.”

jdl562000@yahoo.com

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