This is a as succinct answer as I’ve heard to the criticisms of what McLaren and other emerging/emergent thinkers are trying to do:

I actually think my goal has never been to accommodate to postmodern culture - or in any way to trim the gospel to fit into postmodern tastes. Instead, my goal has been to be honest about the ways in which the Christian religion in its many forms has already over-accommodated itself to modern Western culture, and before that to medieval Western culture, and before that to ancient Greco-Roman culture. These are accommodations about which I wish some of my critics would become more concerned.

Having learned from the past, I would hope we could strive to live faithfully in the world of today - an increasingly postmodern, postcolonial, post-Industrial, post-Christendom, and otherwise post-al world. Our goal should be to live fully “in” the world - incarnationally in it, missionally sent into it … but not to be “of” it, as Jesus said.

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