In 2003 McLaren and Campolo published a book, Adventures in Missing the Point. The subtitle was How the Culture-Controlled Church Neutered the Gospel. Now Brian and Tony admitted that they didn't see all that much; that they were rubbing their eyes and trying to be aware of where their perspective had been foggy. They said they were trying to wake up.

They were not very good at waking up.

I think it would be fair to say that the emergent movement might well be remembered as Ichabod's Most Excellent Snooze. It is still sleeping.

Theirs is a disappointing but instructive experience. You should learn from it.

Emergents resented the church they were brought up in. I can't blame them for that; it's probably the only thing we agree on. It really was a disgusting place in many respects. It certainly disgusted me. I was a PK and had a certain proximity to it: I had a great view of the underbelly. When your mom goes fisticuffs with the head deacon's wife, you get something of a counterweight to your uplifting reading of Pilgrim's Progress.  I also ran with other PKs, and if you know anything about PKs you know they are a pestiferous and stiff-necked people. If Brian and Tony had ended their book at page 15, I could have been more sympathetic. Anyone who thinks Western Christianity since the 1920s was a healthy church needs to be physically restrained for their own safety and the family's peace of mind.

But the movement that survived the book was a serious failure. A mob of these village louts decided that if their hearts-and-lace churches weren't attractive, they would rebel. They would be crude, illiterate, profane, unlettered, tattooed, pierced, sacrilegious, pornographic, pompous and annoying, and they would play electric guitars. That would show the world just how committed to Christ they were.

There is a book by Steve Hughes which is not atypical. Here are some chapter titles which reflect the depth of their thinking:

I Know other Christians but You're Different
Street Preachers, Jesus Freaks, Bible Thumpers, & Other Annoying People
I Don't Want to Be a Christian
There's Nothing Holy about This Book, the Bible
What the Hell!
Dark Matter, Dinosaurs, Darwin, & Dark Chocolate
The Church Sucks
Jesus, Liberator of Women & Social Revolutionary
Las Vegas, Outer Space, Jesus, & You

This is not what booklovers would call a thought-provoking tome. This is not Reformation. This is just another buffoon with a trombone. These are just naked savages throwing spears at a church building. Or perhaps I should say it is just a picture of naked savages throwing spears at a church building.

What they didn't understand was that they were the product of that culture. Their pastors, Sunday School teachers, camp counselors, parents and families raised them with this prosaic, parochial, dim-witted attitude. They were not the first generation in the history of man to rise above the environment and clearly gaze at creation to perceive the eternal verities. They mock verities. They got their views exactly where their parents and counselors got their views: the world around them.

Their parents were moved by the art of Lawrence Welk, they are moved by the art of Paul David Hewson. This is not a revolution! The same mindless crooning; just a different band. Like their parents they are chasers of the wind.

They don't take vows of chastity, poverty and obedience, they live as middle-class people (with outside financial support) among the inner-city poor. They sign sheets of paper on behalf of the poor people of Biafra or Darfur or Myanmar or they give pocket change to tsunami victims or for some other disaster du jour. Even their tepid liberality is formulaic, managed and predictable. Ask yourself, what sort of culture has its generosity stimulated by organizations like the United Way or Compassion International? Followers of Jesus or civic drones? Emergents lament the corporate and institutional church, but read their websites and see the enterprises and institutions that excite their imagination.

You'd think Jesus founded Greenpeace and sent his disciples out two by two as civil engineers.

A lot is being said now about culture; most of it is rubbish and is only polluting the stream. There are a few books by academics that are helpful, but a culture is not a few books written by people with the training and work schedules conducive to reading and writing.

Culture is not decoration; it is a people's expression of what is believed to be true, felt in the heart and sharable with others. To deny that there is even such a thing as truth is a mark of one's thrall to philistinism. If you are completely oblivious to aidos, morphe, phusis, schemata, and mimesis, you have nothing to say. Not about chastity, not about evangelism, not about good works, not about redemption and not about an eschatological hope.

The tragic thing is that emergents have not transcended culture at all, they merely updated the "culture-controlled church".

So the more debased the secular culture becomes, the further out of reach the Gospel becomes, and this is the fine work of fundagelicals and emergents.

Missing the Point 2.0.