At the Associated Church Press conference two weeks ago in Ft. Worth, Texas, I heard Phyllis Tickle, founding editor of the religion department at Publishers Weekly, speak about Christianity's every-500-years growth spurts. In her talk (and forthcoming book The Great Emergence: How Christianity is Changing and Why), Tickle emphasized that Christianity is going through one of these "spurts" right now.

Tickle calls our present historical moment (read: the last 100 years) "Emerging Christianity." (This is not precisely the same thing as the self-identified "emergent church" networks, but there may be similar characteristics.) Historically, these great emergences are sometimes symbolized by a rose blooming forth from the rubble.

"Emerging or emergent Christianity is the new form of Christianity that will serve the whole of the Great Emergence in the same way that Protestantism served the Great Reformation," she said.

Emerging Christianity, posits Tickle, brings together – rather than divides - the best practices of the Christian traditions, practices that have been divided in the church and held within denominations for 500 years. It also looks back at ancient church practices and tries to apply them in fresh ways in the post-modern era.

Brian McLaren's newest book Finding Our Way Again: The Return of the Ancient Practices, also examines Emerging Christianity as a "way of life" rather than a "set of beliefs." McLaren reclaims ancient Christian spiritual practices -- fixed-hour prayer, fasting, observing the Sabbath -- for use today. Dallas Willard has been playing with this same idea in his call to move the Christian church away from "sin management" and toward "discipleship" (see The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life in God).

Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams took up a similar theme in an April lecture titled The Spiritual and the Religious: Is the Territory Changing?

Williams opens his remarks by quoting U2's Bono: "I'm not into religion. I am completely anti-religious. Religion is a term for a collection, a denomination. I am interested in personal experience of God."

Williams brilliantly unpacks the "spiritual, not religious" conundrum:

The Christian alternative to the post-religious spirituality outlined earlier is not simply "religion" as some sort of intellectual and moral system, but the corporately experienced reality of the kingdom, the space that has been cleared in human imagination and self-understanding by the revealing events of Jesus' life.

 … Faced with the claims of non-dogmatic spirituality, the believer should not be insisting anxiously on the need for compliance with a set of definite propositions; he or she should be asking whether what happens when the Assembly meets to adore God and lay itself open to his action looks at all like a new and transforming environment, in which human beings are radically changed.

I've been at Sojourners for 22 years. At its best, Sojourners (in all its manifestations as ministry, Christian intentional community, church, magazine, Christian communications nexus, movement mobilizer, etc.) has been an experiment in Emerging Christianity.

We are evangelical in our roots and ecumenical in our expression—drawing on the best of Christian practices that are held denominationally. For example, when we are operating at our best, we try to take scripture as seriously as Protestants, understand communion as deeply as Catholics, rely on the Spirit as passionately as Pentecostals, preach a prophetic word of good news as zealously as evangelicals, and live a contemplative life rooted in the ever-present Imago Dei as humbly as Orthodox.

As a cluster of Christians, we strive to practice "open-source" spiritual leadership, or "priesthood of all believers," or authority rooted in gifts of the Spirit. Additionally, we understand following Jesus as a "way of life"—the Tao of Jesus, the Jesus Road. This "way of life" leads us also to take the doctrinal teachings of the church very seriously -- because we've lived them, not (necessarily) because we signed a contractual arrangement or took a loyalty oath with the church.

I'm grateful to Phyllis Tickle, Brian McLaren, Archbishop Rowan, Karen Ward, the New Monastics, and others who are keeping our rosebush tended.

As the 15th-century hymn celebrates, "Lo, how a Rose e're blooming from tender stem hath sprung!"

Rose Marie Berger, a Sojourners associate editor, is a Catholic peace activist and poet.

Jim Wallis, in his book The Great Awakening said,

Imagine something called Justice Revivals in the powerful tradition of revivals past, but focusing on the great moral issues of our time. Imagine linking the tradition of Billy Graham with the tradition of Martin Luther King Jr. Imagine a new generation of young people catching fire and offering their gifts, talents, and lives in a new spiritual movement for social justice. Imagine such revivals taking place in cities’ great convention centers, but resulting in thousands of small groups for ongoing discipleship, training, and action in every neighborhood of those cities. Imagine disillusioned believers coming back to faith after many years of alienation, while other seekers discover the power of faith for the first time. Imagine social movements rising out of spiritual revival and actually changing the wind of both our culture and our politics. Imagine a fulfillment in our time of the words of the prophet Amos: ‘Let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.’ Just imagine.

We plan on three nights of preaching and worship. Tonight, Wednesday, April 16, we will call people to make a commitment to Christ. Matt Redman, the writer of many of our worship songs, and his band will join us for worship. On Thursday night, we will call people to work for justice in the Central Ohio community and we will host the Raymond Wise Gospel Choir as our worship leaders. And on Friday night, we will focus on issues of global justice. Worship we will be led by Vineyard Columbus’ new worship pastor, Clarence Church, together with some worship leaders from other churches in Central Ohio.

Then on Saturday, thousands of members of Central Ohio churches will fan out into our community and to dozens of servant evangelism projects such as fixing up local schools, visiting nursing homes, and working on homes for Habitat for Humanity.

We have several goals that we hope to accomplish through the Justice Revival. First of all, we want to transform the public face of Christianity here in Central Ohio. I want our city to know that we followers of Jesus are not at war with our city. I want Christians to be Jeremiah 29:7 people, who “seek the peace and prosperity of the city [where we live] and pray to the Lord for it, because if it prospers, [we] too will prosper.”

I want hundreds of people to be saved through this Justice Revival and to come into fellowship with local churches throughout our community. I want to see churches across Central Ohio united in the practical service of our city and in reaching our city for Christ. Many of Columbus’ largest churches are already involved in helping to host this Justice Revival including First Church of God, Grove City Nazarene, Faith Ministries, Reynoldsburg United Methodist Church, First Community Church, Rhema Christian Center, and New Salem Baptist. We also have several other Vineyards involved.

We particularly want to call attention to the condition of children in our city by having local churches adopt local public schools for the purpose of mentoring kids. And we want to call attention to global issues of justice especially the Darfur, the tragedy of global sex trafficking, the 30,000 children a day who die of malnutrition and preventable diseases, and the billion people on our planet who live on less than $1 a day.

Through the Justice Revival we want to help redefine what it means to be a Christian disciple so that thousands of Christians will understand that they can’t be good followers of Jesus without also committing to Jesus’ agenda, which includes feeding the hungry, welcoming the stranger, clothing the naked, giving care to the sick, and visiting the prisoner (Matthew 25:35-36).

Rich Nathan is the pastor of the Vineyard Church in Columbus, Ohio, which is the co-sponsor with Sojourners of next week's Justice Revival. Click here for more details.

My dear friend, Ken Wilson, who pastors the Ann Arbor Vineyard, showed me a chart that I found very helpful:

Evangelical	Charismatic
Social Justice	Liturgical

What has happened in the last generation is that there has been border-blending among the four great movements in the church. So we find many evangelicals who feel very comfortable praying for the sick and casting out demons; and there are many evangelicals who engage in liturgical practices such as using the Anglican Book of Common Prayer in their devotional lives, etc.

But while there has been a huge move of border-blending, there are still many corner-dwellers, people who believe that it is entirely wrong for someone in their camp to engage in practices associated with one of the other three camps. Corner-dwellers get really mean and mad when we step out of our traditional boxes.

So, for example, some conservative evangelicals and fundamentalists get mean and mad when we claim to be evangelical, but we engage in border-blending with one of the other wings of the church. Like the Pharisees of Jesus'’ day, some angry corner-dwellers may set themselves up as the judge of what is biblical - like the Pharisees, they get really mad when we associate with “the wrong sort of people,” and, like the Pharisees, they are constantly looking for reasons to accuse border-blenders for our supposed theological errors.

I look forward to a day when an evangelical church that does a Justice Revival not only doesn’t create any controversy, but hardly raises an eyebrow. I look forward to a day when Christians who hear about a Justice Revival say: “So, what else is new? Of course, evangelical churches are involved in social justice. That is what Christian churches are supposed to do. We are supposed to follow Jesus, who is both the God of justification and the God of justice!”

Rich Nathan is the pastor of the Vineyard Church in Columbus, Ohio, which is the co-sponsor with Sojourners of next week's Justice Revival. Click here for more details.

During the closing days of January, more than 15,000 Baptists from 30 different Baptist denominations gathered together at the Convention Center in Atlanta. Although all Baptist groups were invited to join in what was called The New Baptist Covenant, official representatives from the largest Baptist group in the U.S., the Southern Baptist Convention, were conspicuously absent. Although they were invited, the SBC officials chose not to attend. There were good reasons for that.

First, the plenary speakers at this gathering were not speakers who would have been welcomed at the annual meetings of the SBC. They included Bill Clinton, Jimmy Carter, Al Gore, and John Grisham - all of whom would likely be treated as persona non grata by Southern Baptist leaders.

Secondly, and perhaps most importantly, the unspoken agenda of the New Baptist Covenant was to provide a Baptist alternative to the politics and practices of the Southern Baptist Convention. Those Baptists who did attend, representing denominations with a combined membership of more than 20 million other Baptists, were viewed by the leaders of the SBC as a kind of "in your face" demonstration that they were tired of being painted by the general public with the same broad brush that has wrongly allied them with many positions taken by the SBC.

Most of those in this New Baptist Covenant, unlike their SBC brothers and sisters, have no problem with women in the pastoral ministry, and are not necessarily fans of the Bush administration. Strong anti-war sentiment was easily discernable among those in attendance. Representing what they considered a moderate stance on such issues - in contrast with the overtly Religious Right commitment of the SBC - they went on to reaffirm historic Baptist principles. These included a belief that the local church should decide on what should be its practices (in contrast to the SBC practice that Baptist state conventions can lay down beliefs and practices that determine whether or not a given church is acceptable for membership in their respective fellowships); and the principle of "sole conscience," which abhors doctrinal conformity (in contrast to the SBC requiring the signing on to creedal statements by any who would be its missionaries or serve in its denominational seminaries or offices).

In seeking unity among the many Baptist participants, those who planned this get-together selected Concern for the Poor as their theme for the conference. Recognizing that there are more than 2000 verses in Scripture that call upon the people of God to care for the poor, the organizers of the New Baptist Covenant decided that there would be no argument among those attending this gathering, given this focus of attention.

It seemed to work! There was a sense of joyful oneness pervading each and every session. In this respect, the New Baptist Covenant was in harmony with the defining mission of Sojourners. This movement lent support to the work of Jim Wallis, who has zeroed in on eliminating poverty as the primary concern of Sojourners.

The negatives of this meeting of Baptists included the absence of significant representatives from African-American denominations, even though the gathering was planned to follow the meetings of two of America's largest African-American denominations, and was held in the very same convention hall. It was reported that many of the members of these two large groups of Baptists were unable to finance staying in Atlanta for an extra three days, which attending the meeting of the New Baptist Covenant required.

Another shortcoming of this gathering was that there was no clear-cut vision of what the next steps should be. There were important questions that were not answered. Is the New Baptist Covenant supposed to function as some kind of new informally-organized denomination? Is the call to care for the poor, so eloquently prescribed in the speeches, going to be translated into some specific programs? Will there be a team of leaders to give direction and some kind of organization to this New Baptist Covenant? It should be noted that the executives of the represented Baptist groups have an upcoming meeting planned, at which time these and other questions probably will be answered.

Whatever might have been the shortcomings and critiques of what transpired in Atlanta, however, there emerged clear evidence that this New Baptist Covenant could be the beginning of something very significant for Baptists. It could represent a movement that could transcend the partisan politics, too often evident among Southern Baptists, and could be a major step in moving Baptists into being a visible and viable partner with other mainstream denominations.

Tony Campolo is founder of the Evangelical Association for the Promotion of Education (EAPE) and professor emeritus of sociology at Eastern University.

On Easter Sunday sermons about new life and transformation, resurrection and redemption abound. At our church we celebrated the baptism of a young man living in a half way house and doing work-release in our community. The genuine hugs and welcome from the mostly black congregation for this young white man were warm and genuine. One church member sponsors work release, another church member picks up the four to five who come for events and church, and this young man felt touched by God in the welcoming community. He stood holding the baptismal candle and asked God and us for help for the journey of restoration ahead.

Three to four thousand people are released each year into our low income, African American, two square mile community. National statistics show a 67% recidivism rate, with costly results in human lives and our national pocketbooks. Congressman Danny Davis has been pushing and cajoling Congress for six years to pass the Second Chance Act, helping former inmates reenter our communities with funding for job training, substance abuse treatments, housing, tutoring, etc. The bill finally passed the House and Senate.

In his summation, Congressman Davis noted that major religions speak about resurrection and redemption, and that is how lawmakers should view helping ex-offenders reenter society and rebuild lives. He went on to say, "We are a country that preaches redemption in our churches, synagogues, and mosques. That we can practice what we have preached is what we want to show with this measure."

It will take God's touch in peoples lives, people willing to reach out and help, along with government's assistance to really reclaim the many lives from incarceration and recidivism. This is but a small, hopeful start to new life.

Mary Nelson is president emeritus of Bethel New Life, a faith-based community development corporation on the west side of Chicago. She is also a board member of Sojourners.

The media frenzy over the remarks of Barack Obama's former pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, raise critical challenge to the prophetic role and voice of the black church. These "incendiary" remarks have set off a firestorm in the media, exposing the deep divide that exists on Sundays - America's most segregated hour of the week. This controversy serves as a stark reminder that the problem of the color line that still divides the U.S. and its churches. This often misguided debate obscures the rich and necessary prophetic role of the black church. Most coverage fails to capture the competing narratives and self-definitions of the U.S. that coexist depending on one's race and social location. While I'm uncomfortable with some of Dr. Wright's overly provocative rhetoric, and disagree with some of his claims (like his suggestion that AIDS was a creation of the U.S. government), I still vehemently defend the prophetic tradition that Rev. Wright has advanced over the course of 36 years of ministry. I agree with the Rev. Otis Moss III, the new Pastor of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, that we do a grave disservice by boiling down over 207,000 minutes of Dr. Wright's preaching into a handful of 30-second sound bites, most taken out of context.

Many may be wondering what I mean by prophetic voice and asking why it is so critical for the full vocation of the church and the health of our democracy. Prophets foretell the future in the name of God, speaking truth to power against injustice while calling us back to God's word and kingdom. According to Obery Hendricks, "prophetic speech is characterized by an overwhelming sense of an encounter with God and a message of moral and political judgment that a prophet feels divinely compelled to proclaim … to change social orders that have stratified inequities of power and privilege and wealth so all can have access to the fullest fruits of life". Amos, Jeremiah, Isaiah, and so many other biblical prophets did not mince words or shy away from controversy. Like these prophets, prophetic preachers are often misunderstood, persecuted, and sometimes even killed for their words. Jesus continues this long and rich tradition when he says in Matthew 23:3, "Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you tithe mint, dill, and cummin, and have neglected the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faith." This is also exemplified in the gospel of Luke when he overturns the tables of the money changers in the temple just after riding a donkey into Jerusalem on the Palm Sunday that the church just commemorated.

Arguably, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. embodied the best of the black prophetic tradition as one who courageously pronounced judgment against America for the sin of racism and the cancer of Jim Crow segregation. But King also called on America become the beloved community, ensuring that God's demands for dignity and justice and the rights guaranteed by the Constitution were afforded to all Americans. King's life was cut tragically short exactly 40 years ago in April because of his prophetic witness - describing the war in Vietnam as a "demonic suction tube," calling the U.S. "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today, and forewarning to striking sanitation workers in Memphis that like Dives in the parable of Lazarus, "America is going to hell if we don't use her vast resources to end poverty and make it possible for all of God's children have the basic necessities of life." Our nation is quick to romanticize the Dr. King of Montgomery and Selma, but often ignores the King of Memphis that demanded a living wage, or the King of Riverside Church who declared silence around the Vietnam War as betrayal.

A preacher's job sometimes requires prodding and provoking a congregation, shining a light on some of our most uncomfortable realities and hard-to-accept truths. I find it hard to believe that anyone could attend a church for years and never take issue with at least some of the things that were said by even the most respected and beloved pastor. Black prophetic preaching often criticizes America for its transgressions, contradictions, and hypocrisy, but at its best does this out of a deep and abiding belief in God's justice and love for what America could become if it lived out the full promise of her ideals. When the prophetic tradition holds up a mirror to our nation's misdeeds and imperfections, it stands tall with the biblical prophets of old. This is good company to keep indeed.

Adam Taylor is director of campaigns and organizing for Sojourners.

They came to the Georgia World Congress Center by the thousands. They represented thirty different Baptist groups from across the nation, along with an array of representatives from Baptist groups from abroad. This gathering, held January 30 to February 1, 2008, marked the historic beginning of what is being called The New Baptist Covenant. This is not a new "super" denomination, but rather, is an association of separate Baptist denominations that are committing to work together to further ministries that will serve Christ and His Kingdom.

The one single cause around which all of these Baptist groups could rally without debate was the call of Christ to address the needs of the poor. There was recognition of the fact that there were differences among those who were signing on to this New Baptist Covenant, but the participants all recognized a basic principle of the Baptist tradition, which is the autonomy of the local church. True Baptists, from the time of Roger Williams, the initiator of the Baptist movement here in America, down to the present, have always held that local congregations should develop their own rules and regulations for faith and practice. Following that lead meant that there were some Baptists present, for instance, who did not support the ordination of women to the preaching ministry, even though most of those who were present were champions of the claim that women should have the right to hold any and every role in church leadership. There were those present who affirmed gay marriage, while most of the others were opposed to it. Some held pro-war positions, but there were many who were pacifists. Nevertheless, all who were in attendance were united in affirming the call to address the needs of the poor.

If ever Jim Wallis and the Call to Renewal Movement, which he was instrumental in starting, needed assurances that what they were doing was producing results, the New Baptist Covenant provided it. This new association, representing more than 20 million Baptists, made addressing the problems of poverty their basic cause, and this is the kind of thing that the Call to Renewal people have hoped would happen to church groups everywhere. The politics of the Call to Renewal have been the politics of poverty, and it obviously was the politics of the New Baptist Covenant.

The gathering had a list of star-studded platform speakers that included former Vice President Al Gore, John Grisham, the best selling author, former presidents Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter, and Marian Wright Edelman of the Children's Defense League. There also were seminars that included some of the premier prophetic voices of our day. For example, James Forbes and Wil Campbell taught eager listeners what they had learned about preaching sermons with a prophetic edge. But in the midst of all the sermons and seminars promoting social justice for the poor, those in the New Baptist Covenant never lost sight of the need to win the lost to the salvation of the cross.

The Southern Baptist Convention was not represented at this gathering by their own choice. They were invited, but several of their leaders took exception to the speakers who were listed on the program for the Atlanta meeting. Several of the SBC's most prominent spokesmen condemned the meetings for what they perceived to their liberal tendencies. The net result is that the New Baptist Covenant may end up being a counter-Baptist group to the theological fundamentalism of the Southern Baptist Convention and its espousal of Religious Right politics. This, in the long run, may prove advantageous to the other Baptist groups in the New Baptist Covenant, whose members are often upset when they are lumped together with Southern Baptists, and have to put up with being labeled with that convention's overt support of the war in Iraq and President Bush's policies.

Already, the leadership of the New Baptist Covenant is planning the next steps that must be taken if this new "association" is to be more than just a one-time gathering with some inspiring talk. Many are waiting to see if "the talk" is translated into action and concrete efforts to end poverty, both in America and in the Third World. Given who the leaders are, I believe it would be surprising if the hopes generated at the Atlanta gathering were not actualized.

Tony Campolo is founder of the Evangelical Association for the Promotion of Education (EAPE) and professor emeritus of sociology at Eastern University.

The Global Christian Forum is a new phenomenon bringing together Christian churches from throughout the globe and the different parts of the Christian community - from Pentecostal to Catholic, historic Protestant to Orthodox. In the March issue of Sojourners, Wesley Granberg-Michaelson describes the Forum's historic gathering last November of 245 Christian leaders in Limuru, Kenya, "where God's Spirit began erasing the excuses that have kept Christians judging one another and apart from one another." Below, he gives an update.

Last week about 18 of us from throughout the world, representing the full spectrum of the Christian community, were in Geneva to help figure out what happens next with the Global Christian Forum. The committee, which has guided the GCF process, gathered at a small hotel and, for the first morning, simply shared our impressions and experiences since the Limuru meeting.

Rev. Nicta Lubaale, general secretary of the Organization of African Instituted Churches, spoke of how there was not a bureaucracy filled with "power games," but a genuine place of fresh fellowship that must continue. Prince Guneratnum, who is pastor of a 5,000 member Pentecostal congregation in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, reflected on what a blessing this was to the churches. Several of us kept pointing to how we were not centered around structures, or arguments around particular doctrines, but had put our focus on getting to know one another as brothers and sisters in Christ, and that this is the model that the wider church needs.

We agreed that the Limuru gathering, as the culminating meeting of a nearly 10-year process of exploration and preparation, had found a "spiritual entry point," and something new had emerged. Our Vatican representative said that this has become a place where we can tap into God's energies and become a source of light. And Metropolitan Mar Gregorios from Syria said that for the 21^st Century, we need something new like this. Those like him who have been in WCC circles said that its approach, emphasizing the search for theological common ground in groups like Faith and Order, had its place and role. But the Global Christian Forum had discovered a different starting point—what one Lutheran member called a "lived ecclesiology"—and we must keep our focus here.

All this underscored our pattern of beginning with the sharing of our spiritual journeys. This testimonial approach, across such vast differences of theology, culture, geography, and tradition, was the unique gift that made so much else possible. Nicta put it this way: The Global Christian Forum gave us a picture of "the imagined church."

So what now?

We came up with clear ideas and commitments. First, communicating the vision and experience of the GCF will be a priority. We've got about 1,500 people on an e-mail list who have had some contact with the Forum over the past decade, and about 245 who were at Limuru last November. They have to be the ones to carry this vision, so we'll focus our communication with them.

A couple of independent groups will also do a thorough evaluation done of the whole process since 1998. Those results will be brought to a gathering of about 30 to 40 people in November, meeting in New Delhi, to plan for the next three to five years. Also, since we haven't had a regional meeting in the Middle East (prior to Limuru we held regional meetings in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and Europe), we scheduled this, to be hosted at the end of September by the Syrian Orthodox Church.

Our vision is expansive. The response is so affirming. Our infrastructure and budget are minimal. It's a new paradigm, and we're convinced that God's Spirit is creating a new thing. Huge questions remain ahead, but the journey is as exciting as any ecumenical experience I've ever known.

Wesley Granberg-Michaelsonis general secretary of the Reformed Church in America, a member of the steering committee of the Global Christian Forum (www.globalchristianforum.org), and vice-chair of Sojourners' board of directors.

This is an important year for studies on religious life in the U.S. From Kinnaman and Lyon's UnChristian, to David T. Olson's The American Church in Crisis, data is accumulating that business/ministry as usual is not a great strategy for most U.S. denominations and nondenominations.

The new Pew study highlights the fluidity of commitment among the American people of faith, and it raises important questions for church leaders in at least three areas.

1. If congregations and denominations are not connecting with people's questions, needs, and desires - people are moving on. Old-fashioned denominational loyalty is gone. Church leaders can complain about it, but they'd also better acknowledge it. Now this fact could be used to advocate increased religious pandering ... a "give 'em what they want" approach that turns church leaders into "purveyors of religious goods and services" (a damning turn of phrase from the missional church folk) who are competing for share of the religious market.

But it could also have a much more positive effect: by convincing church leaders that blindly maintaining the status quo is a losing strategy, the data can liberate them to ask deeper questions like ... Why are churches here? What is our mission? What is our core message? Does Christ's church have a mission, or does Christ's mission have a church? How much can, and should, change in our churches? What shifts in church history can guide us as we face this sea-change in our religious environment? In other words, the new data could challenge leaders to ask, not simply, "What do the customers want?" but, "What does God want?" ... and not just "What do members need from their church?" but "What does the world need our churches to become, be, and do so that God's will can be done on earth as it is in heaven?"

2. People are dropping out of church altogether. The fastest-growing religious segment - especially among the young - continues to be the unaffiliated. If the "church growth" question of the 90's was, "How are we going to attract baby boomers to come back to church services on Sunday?" the "church mission" question in coming years might be, "How can our churches inspire younger generations to live a new way of life as disciples each day of the week?"

3. Old categories are blurring and old identities are diversifying and fragmenting. The study highlights the simultaneous growth and diversification of the old evangelical base, for example. As older generations pass from the scene and the alliances they created lose strength, who will help catalyze new movements and alliances? What will their priorities and ethos be?

In light of the accumulating data, it's become increasingly clear: we don't just need new answers to old questions, but we need new questions as well.

Brian McLaren (brianmclaren.net) is board chair for Sojourners. He is in the middle of an eleven-city speaking tour you can learn about at deepshift.org.