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WARNING: The following post contains an accurate representation of emergents' words and ideas and therefore unavoidably constitutes an assault on proper sensibilities. Please exercise discretion before continuing.
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You might remember my visit to Journey Church.

We believe intentional communication with God through sacred acts of prayer, communion, worship, art, music, silence and meditation on Scripture is imperative to life with God.

The service I attended was a demonstration of signal incompetence in prayer, communion, worship, art, music, silence and meditation on Scripture. It was what I would call an experiment in Trinket Religion: shards of bumpkin piety strewn around to make deviant ex-evangelicals comfortable with an adolescent approximation of their parents' religion. It was to Christianity what Charlie Brown's Christmas tree and a plastic reindeer is to Advent.

Our task is not to seek full agreement on all things but to dialogue respectfully and listen for God's voice.

The comments that followed here on the blog were a fair example of Journey Church members' deep commitment to respect and dialogue. I was soon contacted privately by the she-pastor expressing regret over her members' behavior and she offered a nice apology. She also invited me to continue the conversation, but she suggested it not take place here on the blog.

Which was probably wise. The gist of the complaint from the journey-people was not that what I said was wrong; they merely took exception to my review because I hadn't asked them how they felt about their shards of bumpkin piety. I'm not sure she could have helped me there except perhaps to clean up the language a little bit.

Anyway, I dredge up these haunting memories because Journey Church and City Church here in the Metroplex hosted The Church Basement Roadshow: a kind of Special Olympics Revival/Book Tour/Halloween Ball. Devoted reader of emergentvillage.org that I am, I'd noted that they were coming to town and I posted July 18, 7:30 p.m. on my refrigerator. My birthday (and John Calvin's) eight days earlier passed unremembered and unremarked in my anticipation of the anointed hour.

We left the northeast corner of Dallas County for a southwest corner of Dallas with plenty of time; traffic was light and we got to the church early. We continued south on N. Zang Boulevard till we came to a Sonic. My wife likes Sonic and I figured something cheap, heavy and greasy in my stomach would aid in the evening's indigestion.

When we got back to the church we went through the doors crowded with some vaguely familiar faces and the she-pastor. I didn't see the money-bucket set out to collect the cover charge and I passed a table full of Bibles in a beeline for the men's room before I started shaking hands and leafing through books with my over-lubricated fingers. When I got to the men's room there was a guy in fire-engine red underwear. I didn't want to appear judgmental so I didn't snort, but I think he was donning red longjohns because he was suiting up to be a barefoot, red longjohn-wearing usher. I was tempted to ask him how he felt about wearing red longjohns in a religious service, but I decided not to.

I came out and wandered the building as I always do, checking for evidences of religious sensibilities. I went back to the auditorium and found my wife seated, fanning herself with one of those funeral home fans depicting a bearded woman holding a long pole and a lamb. On the back was the url for Wesley Theological Seminary. I gave my wife a disapproving look and remembered the ten buck cover charge, so I went back to the foyer and dropped a $20 bill in the bucket to help defray the costs of such mindless extravagance. With rampant global poverty and children all over the world starving, this is the best stewardship....

One of the things included in the handout packet was a bumper sticker that said, IF YOU LOVE THE CREATOR, TAKE CARE OF CREATION. I told my wife I thought I had time to go out and put it on her car and she gave me a disapproving look. Disapproving looks always provoke second thoughts so I wondered if it might be better to stick it on the bumper of the gas-guzzling, ozone-depleting assault on the creation Pagitt, Jones and Scandrette drive around in. I bet they even use the air-conditioner. Obviously their eschatological hope is a major rip-off.

On the screen was a powerpoint presentation of useless trivia circa 1908. I was reminded that in 1908 the Olympics were held in London.

Seven-thirty came and went and the show hadn't started so I wandered back to check out the book table and see if the "Trucker Frank for President" t-shirt came in my size.

Alas.

Finally the she-pastor, dressed all like a prairie maiden, mounted the stage and announced the beginning of the revival. What followed was a lot of what people in 1908 would have called blasphemy. Three intellectually challenged hayseeds laughing, posing and shouting Hallelujah and Yahweh in mock prayer and praise.

Doug Pagitt does not play the trombone, but he does hold it up to his lips and he works the slide.

He carries a slide whistle in his pocket as well and occasionally pulls it out to play a sound effect for giggles. Clearly he has dedicated himself to the art of the slide whistle and only switched to the trombone so he could move from the percussion section to the brass section. Scandrette is a washboard virtuoso.

They opened the show by declaring that Plato and Socrates were not worth following but that Jesus was. Plato was all about nous, and clearly these prairie frauds wanted to have nothing to do with nous.

I'll spare you the blow-by-blow, but each one got up and read from his book.

Scandrette warned us that what he had to say was perhaps not as polite as we were accustomed to, and he said that the church had been all "effed up". He told us all about Emperor Arcadia [pictured here] and an early conversation wherein the Emperor reveals:

"I HAVE BEEN CONDUCTING EXPERIMENTS ON MYSELF FOR 30 YEARS-EXPLORING THE MYSTERIES OF CHEMISTRY AND HEALTH. MY PRESCRIPTION: EAT A CLOVE OF GARLIC AND DRINK YOUR OWN URINE AND SEMEN TWICE A DAY."

Scandrette went on reading from his book and making about as much sense as the Emperor, and he summed up his chapter (and ministry) with this:

By telling this story I'm not suggesting that everyone could or should make friends with someone like the emperor. What I do know is that I feel alive when I am testing the limits of my own boundaries- finding a source of love that is greater than my own and discovering beauty in unexpected places.

He closed with some doggerel of his own invention which was rather pathetic to hear. It was like a pre-adolescent who'd just read Howl and thought he could do something similar with the right thesaurus.

Go ye into all the world and feel alive testing the limits of your own boundaries and find a love greater than your own.

Discovering beauty in unexpected places was a gift I sorely coveted there on July 18^th at 7:30 p.m.

Scandrette was just a daffy mid-westerner who found fulfillment rubbing shoulders with perverts and degenerates and claiming to be a follower of the One who forgave sinners and told them to go and sin no more, but Jones and Pagitt were priceless.

Pagitt had a profound experience at a passion play but was turned off to the church as a result of some follow-up work which involved evangelical illustrations of salvation. In particular there was a cartoon of a chasm between man and God and a cross which bridged the gap. This puzzled poor Dougie because he'd seen a play that suggested there was no gap between man and God. There was that and there was the heroic image he had of Billy Jack.

Tony Jones is similarly confused. He grew up in what he calls a "mainline church" and ran afoul of some evangelicals during his college years. It was not a happy experience. Evangelicals talked about "unbelievers", a term he couldn't understand in spite of the fact that the library had a dictionary that could help him with words like that. But Tony is not what we would call a scholar: remember that he divided up American Christianity into mainline and snake-handlers. Tony doesn't even know what the term "born again" means.

Tony was also annoyed that these evangelicals inquired after his "QT".

Now I say all this not to embarrass these three mid-western wannabe showfolk. I have read their books, listened to Pagitt on radio interviews, watched Jones on TV shows, and now I've seen their road act. These men clearly cannot be embarrassed.

What is important to take from these charlatans is the fact that they are illiterates who cannot make a philosophical argument (as demonstrated by Jones in his book) and they cannot make a theological case (as Pagitt has shown). And when they get an opportunity to explain their "reformation" in a way that suits their inabilities, in a way unencumbered by reason, literacy, argument, nous or logic, this is what they say.

And this is quite remarkable. Surely it should be rather easy to bring a case against the smarmy, unnuanced, saccharine oversimplifications of American evangelicalism! I mean that can be done by people who have to take lessons in how to fall off a log!

Tony Jones is in college and he doesn't know what grace means. He never learned this in his mainline church, he never consulted a lexicon, a theological dictionary or a concordance, so he asked an evangelical. The evangelical pulls out a pen and makes as though it were a gift. He tells Tony that grace is like an offer of a gift which requires nothing but acceptance. Tony leaves this conversation with the understanding that the story was intended to illustrate the cross. How, he asks, can we equate the central image, the defining event of Christianity with a pen? Tony hadn't yet grasped the purpose of a metaphor. I don't think he has learned since.

This is why emergents have issues with nous and why they are no friends of Plato.

So when you cast your mind back to Marie's experience of being shunned at church because she passed out in the school parking lot trying to get high, and when you recall her conclusion that therefore God cannot be known, you are not looking at a poor example of human reasoning, you are looking at the genius of Emergence.

This explains Tony Jones's confusion about what it means to be born again. It's not that Jones can construct an argument against the new birth from what Jesus actually said or what the Church subsequently taught; all Jones can do is raise the pathetic image of a child being manipulated by the light of a campfire.

This is the ethos of the movement. This is the vibe: adolescent irreverence excusing itself by pointing to painful personal experience.

They had the stage for two hours. There were no songs of Zion, no poetry readings, no gripping monologues, no Chautauqua-like lectures...just self-indulgent bumpkins laughing at what they don't understand and playing to the popular resentments of a degenerate crowd.

This revival had no altar call, of course, but an offering was taken. This move of the spirit is not about repentance and restoration, it is about self-promotion and collecting money. There's a cover charge because it is a show, and there is an offering because it is a show about religion.

Blasphemy, entertainment and greed, these three, but the greatest of these is greed.