The rummage sale

Watching the church convulse at the turn of the millennium, Phyllis Tickle reached for an image she credited to an Anglican bishop, Mark Dyer: about every five hundred years, the church holds a giant rummage sale. The hardened shell the faith has grown — its institutions, its certainties, its settled way of answering everything — cracks, and the household hauls its whole attic out onto the lawn to decide what to keep. It has happened, she observed, on a strange recurring beat: the fall of Rome around 500, the splitting of East and West around 1000, the Reformation around 1500, and now.

And every time, two things are born rather than one. A fresh, more vital form of the faith emerges — and the old form it broke from is not destroyed but purified, handed back its life in a leaner shape. Every rummage sale also forces the same unsettling question up out of the basement: where now is the authority? When the old answer cracks, the church has to discover again what it actually stands on. Jesus had drawn the whole picture centuries before, in a single sentence about wine.

It is easy to read a rummage sale as a death. The familiar is going out the door; the building feels emptier; the people who loved the old arrangement are grieving, and not without reason. But new wine does not burst old skins because the wine has gone bad. It bursts them because it is alive and expanding, and the old container can no longer hold what God is fermenting.

This does not make the upheaval painless — rummage sales are disruptive, and much that is genuinely precious can be carried out with the junk if no one is watching the table. But it changes the question. A shaken church is not necessarily a dying church; it may be a household making room. So alongside what are we losing, the renewing question is also this: what new thing is God pouring, and which skins will have to change to hold it?