The rummage sale
Phyllis Tickle names the pattern
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.
“They put new wine into fresh wineskins, and both are preserved.”
— Jesus, on new wine — Matthew 9:17 (WEB)
“Don't remember the former things, neither consider the things of old. Behold, I will do a new thing... I will even make a way in the wilderness, and rivers in the desert.”
A rummage sale is the whole four-phase cycle at the scale of a church: the body disconnects from a form it has outgrown, disorients in the clearing-out, reorients around a truer center, and reconnects in a leaner shape. Most shaken churches are somewhere in that cycle without knowing it has a name — or an end.
You hold your own rummage sales. There are seasons when God clears out a faith you have outgrown — the answers that worked at twenty, the certainties that cannot carry your forties — and the emptying feels like loss until you realize it is making room. The clutter of an old faith can crowd out the living thing it was built to hold. So watch your own table carefully, because real treasure can be carried off with the junk if no one is paying attention. But do not mistake the emptying for the end. When the familiar goes out the door of your own soul, learn to tell the wine from the skins, and trust that what God clears away in you, He clears to make room for something more alive.
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. 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?
The whole Church holds rummage sales on a strange recurring beat. Phyllis Tickle, paraphrased and credited here rather than quoted, traced roughly five-hundred-year hinges — the fall of Rome, the rupture of East and West, the Reformation, and the upheaval underway now — when the hardened shell of the faith cracks and the household of God hauls its attic onto the lawn to decide what to keep. Each time, two things are born: a fresher, more vital form of Christianity, and an older form not destroyed but purified, handed back its life in a leaner shape. The decline so many fear in this generation may be a rummage sale, not a funeral. The new wine has always outlasted the skins.
The wine itself — the gospel of Jesus Christ. Skins change every few centuries; the new-covenant wine they were made to hold does not. What cannot be shaken is never the arrangement; it is the Lord the arrangement existed to serve.
- What in my faith might be an old skin God is asking me to release — and what is the wine He is protecting?
- When the Church changes, do I grieve the gospel, or only the arrangement I was comfortable with?
- Where might an emptying in my life actually be God making room?
Lord, when the familiar goes out the door, teach me to tell the wine from the skins. Give me courage for Your rummage sales — in me, and in Your whole Church — and faith that what You clear away, You clear to make room for something more alive. Amen.