What’s wrong with the emerging church?

See the question “What is the emerging church?” for the necessary caveat that it is difficult to accurately generalize about the emerging church. Still, somebody’s gotta do it.

Basically, what’s wrong with the emerging church is that it takes the postmodern ideology and cultural mood as its starting point—its “given”—which then relativizes Scripture’s role as our authoritative norm for life and doctrine. Examples? Proponents of the emerging church tend to:

• Make the gospel more about renewing this world than being saved from the wrath of God.
• Want the church to be an egalitarian, unstructured web of relationships, either ignoring or distorting the Bible’s teaching about the church in the process.
• Replace preaching with dialogue.
• Soften Scripture’s harder truths and ethical demands in order to conform more to the ethics of postmodern pluralism.