Rob Bell came out of the Emergent Church movement about 10 years ago. A group of pastors got together to address the question of an aging, dying church population. They asked the question, “how do we get young people back into church?” Among those in the movement were Bell, Brian McLaren, Mark Driscoll, Dan Kimball, John Piper, et.al. They branched almost immediately, with pastors like Driscoll and Piper adhering to gospel while reaching the youth through their culture, and others like Bell and McLaren re-molding scripture to fit the culture.
Thanks for the heads up.
I am not going to spend very much time criticizing Driscoll and even less time criticizing Piper. Both men have done a lot of good work, and as you correctly point out, both men saw early on at least some of the problems of the “emergent church” movement. I follow J. Gresham Machen in declining to criticize people with whom he mostly agreed; we've got enough other problems on our plate to deal with.
But I am going to point out that when the question we ask is “how do we get young people back into church?” rather than “what is the chief end of man” or “what is your only comfort in life and in death,” we run the risk of coming up with some very wrong answers.
God gives the increase, not human methods.
The responsibility of preachers is to remain faithful to the text of the Word of God, not to try to find ways to increase the size of their congregations. Sometimes God blesses faithful pastors with large sheepfolds. Sometimes He doesn't. That's not necessarily any fault of or credit to the pastor — the Chief Shepherd is the One who makes those decisions.
Given enough time, liberalism and other forms of heresy will destroy churches. But because some people have itching ears and like churches with pastors who suit their tastes, heretics can succeed over the short run in building some pretty large congregations.
Frankly, a youth-oriented focus in churches is simply wrongheaded and misplaced. The way to keep young people in church is to teach fathers how to catechize their children, or otherwise explain what the Bible says and why their church believes what it believes.
I would say some very different things if we were talking about a college-age ministry to students who are on their own for the first time away from home, or a military chaplaincy to the 18-25 age demographic, or an outreach to troubled youth from broken homes. In those contexts, a youth-oriented focus to young people who don't know or don't understand the Gospel is entirely appropriate.
But God created families for a reason, and inside the church, the church needs to be encouraging and promoting the God-ordained means of bringing young people to faith through families, not creating a whole host of human methods to reach young people apart from those God-ordained methods.