Adventures in Missing the Point

Adventures in Missing the Point: How the Culture-Controlled Church Neutered the Gospel
By Brian D. McLaren and Tony Campolo
Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2003
Review by Carl McColman

The writing of Brian D. McLaren was recommended to me by two very different friends: an Episcopalian who is also a Sufi healing minister, and a non-denominational evangelical involved in the emerging and house church movements. Sufficiently intrigued, I picked up this book, which also introduced me to the well known "liberal evangelical" Tony Campolo. It's really written for a specific audience: for evangelical Christians who are struggling to articulate their sense of "there's something more" or "there's something amiss" with the state of the evangelical world. Since I have never been an evangelical (the closest I came was attending a nondenominational charismatic youth group meeting for several months back in the 1970s), reading Adventures in Missing the Point seemed almost voyeuristic to me — I was glimpsing through the window at another family's earnest discussion, a discussion that could easily explode into an argument but for the efforts of those making their case to keep their heads cool. At the beginning of the book, the authors warn against letting this book be fuel for judgmentalism: "But shame on you if you use this book to critique others, to point the finger and say, 'See how they're missing the point!' If you do that, you're missing the point. This adventure is not about finding the splinter in someone else's eye, not about judging others for their poor vision." Well, then, with this caveat firmly in mind, I'll share my thoughts on this book: basically, I think it does what it sets out to do very well. McLaren and Campolo take turns writing brief chapters an a variety of issues, both central and controversial, to the evangelical ethos: the chapter titles — "Salvation," "End Times," "The Bible," "Women in Ministry," "Homosexuality," "Sin" — sums it up rather nicely. Each author then provides a brief response to each of the chapters written by the other. So what emerges has the feel of a conversation, a stereophonic presentation of how progressives/liberals/postmoderns (take the adjective of your choice, I get the sense that both authors try to avoid wearing labels of this sort) within the evangelical community are trying to open up new ways of thinking, believing, and doing church.

Reading this as very much an outsider (I'm in no danger of being accused of membership in the religious right), my reactions veered from insight (it's encouraging to see McLaren try to deconstruct the personalist soteriology that dogs the evangelical world) to pleasure (the chapter in which McLaren skewers the sexist-driven exegetical inconsistencies that keeps women out of evangelical ministry was a delight) to frustration (Campolo's commendable but timid efforts at calling for compassion toward lesbians and gays is undermined by his own theology of purity that results in his hastening to assure his readers that he believes "the Bible tells us that same-gender eroticism is wrong" — I get the sense that he hasn't read Episcopal theologian William Countryman, whose magisterial Dirt, Greed, and Sex: Sexual Ethics in the New Testament and Their Implications for Today consigns homophobic readings of the Bible to the dustbins where they belong). Campolo and McLaren begin to sound like brothers: Campolo the slightly more conservative and mainstream elder brother who cautions his rather visionary but excitable younger brother, who in turn gently eggs the elder on.

If my biggest gripe about this book is that it doesn't go far enough, that probably says more about the gulf that separates me from the intended audience than anything else. One of the crying issues facing Christianity today is the need to build bridges between the conservative and liberal camps. It's too easy for folks like me to take refuge in the writings of Marcus Borg and John Shelby Spong and simply dismiss the benighted evangelicals as unworthy of our attention. But that's a grave mistake, as writers like McLaren, or Jim Wallis, make clear. I hope every conservative Christian reads this book. And liberal Christians need to read it too, if for no other reason than to see how progressive evangelicals make their case to those on the right.