Phyllis Tickle: New Book Paints Picture of a Complicated, Controversial, Compelling and Deeply Christian Woman

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

She made me feel not like 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 six each morning.

He writes about how she had two miscarriages, and then how she and her husband, Sam, raised six children. We also learn of her intense 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. Sweeny 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.

As revealed in the book, Sam was bisexual, and had occasional sex partners who were men. She “lived with this silent pain around her marriage for decades,” Sweeney writes.

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

She had many gay friends. She became aware of the suffering of gay men and women during the AIDS crisis in the 1980s when her husband, Sam, a doctor, treated gay patients with the disease.

Together, they were angered by how church leaders “speak uncaringly, unchristianly, on this subject.” She came to believe that these “broken and rejected and battered and publically rejected” people were exactly the people Jesus died for and accepted.

Later, she believed the Holy Spirit led her to support acceptance of LGBTQ people, and also worshipped in an affirming congregation.

However, she didn’t participate in the theological debates about the issue of homosexuality; if pressed for her opinion, she preferred to “go in sideways” through parables or stories from the Bible.

“I’m pretty sure head-on would be a wreck waiting to happen,” she stated.

According to Sweeney, Tickle said her job wasn’t to make theological or biblical arguments for gay equality in the church. “Her job, instead, was more pastoral.”

She could be blunt in her language. She once described theology as “the noise of old men farting in the wind.” When asked if she was a Christian, she replied “You bet your sweet tush I am.”

Also, she had a near death experience, while pregnant with her first child. She never spoke about it much in public, but once wrote it was like being “without a care for anything that had ever been or ever was or ever might be, I lifted toward the light . . . and it said ‘come.’”

Of that experience, she said: “For the life of me I can never be scared of death again.”

If she knew she were to die in the next five minutes, she said, “I’d be somewhere between delighted and ecstatic.”

There is, of course, much more about her private life in the book, and her public life, too. 

Sweeney writes about her groundbreaking work as the founding editor of the religion department for Publisher’s Weekly, and how she helped nurture and promote a publishing revolution for religious and spiritual books in the U.S. and beyond.

And, of course, Tickle was a prolific author herself—she wrote over three dozen books, including a number on prayer.

But for many, it was The Great Emergence: How Christianity is Changing and Why, published in 2008, that brought her to their attention. 

In that compelling and controversial book, she outlined the changes facing western Christianity today, using the metaphor of a garage sale to describe the upheavals facing the church in the 21^st 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 LGBTQ 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. 

Sweeny 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 that 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.”

Looking back, 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.”

As for me, Tickle was all those things, and a friend. Sweeney's book adroitly captures Tickle's private and public personas, and leaves us with a colourful portrait of a compelling, controversial, complicated and deeply Christian woman. 

A shorter version of this column appeared in the Oct. 13, 2018 Winnipeg Free Press.