The Father, the Son and the Holy JumboTron

Cobia created a special series of services called "Living a High Impact Life" (its visual metaphor, shown on-screen, was a field of wheat blowing in the wind) to prepare his core flock for Easter, the day that Renaissance threw open its doors to the public. The event was supplemented by what Young calls a "marketing blitz," developed by the church's Leadership Group working in tandem with a California ad agency whose clients include Coca-Cola and Nike. Says Cobia, the folks at the agency "get what we're about" since they've worked with these kinds of churches before -- in California. Renaissance couldn't find a local ad agency able to think of church as anything but traditional.

(Some preliminary designs from the California firm went a little too far with the technological theme: One ad had an image of a PalmPilot against a solid red background with copy about the church printed inside the PDA's screen. It was too small to read, but the agency was on the right track.)

In one service, Cobia gets to the heart of what he and other religious leaders believe is a major obstacle in bringing new parishioners to the pews. When he asks his audience to name the first thing that comes to mind when he says the word "evangelist," no one speaks, so he answers himself: embarrassment. He cites a poll in which people were asked to rate occupations by their degree of honesty -- evangelists came third to last, above drug dealers and organized crime bosses.

If Cobia had gone on to list some specifics, he might have hit on Tammy Faye and Jim Bakker as well as the caricature of the evangelical priest preaching about hellfire and brimstone, or pop-culture parallels like Ned Flanders and the Church Lady. These are the associations that churches like Ginghamsburg and Renaissance are trying to shake to attract a clientele that's turned off by the preconceived notions of organized religion.

But it is by straying from hellfire and brimstone that churches of the Media Reformation are infuriating their peers. Mainline Protestants call this brand of church "religion lite" and "Hallmark card religion." In his book "Losing Our Virtue: Why the Church Must Recover Its Moral Vision," evangelical theologian Dave Wells says, "With tricks, gadgets, gimmicks and marketing ploys, it shamelessly adapts itself to our emptied out, blinded, postmodern world."

Gary Gilley, pastor of the Southern View Chapel in Springfield, Ill., has written in his church newsletter (in boldface), "The gospel is not about helping Harry [a typical new churchgoer] feel better about himself and his circumstances; it is about his rebelliousness against a holy God who will ultimately condemn him to hell if he does not repent and trust in Christ for the forgiveness of his sins."

Leonard Sweet sees this criticism as a necessary symptom of change. He compares what's going on now, this "turning" as he calls it, to the Protestant Reformation, which was prompted by the invention of the printing press and Martin Luther's determination to mass-produce the Bible in the language of the common people. That rabble-rouser was accused of heresy and forced to hide for his life in a castle. "These turnings can be quite difficult for the church to go through," says Sweet. No one is likely to die for the Media Reformation, though Ginghamsburg and its disciples will likely endure eternal grumbling from traditionalists.

Os Guiness, a prolific old-school evangelical pastor, predicts that media-driven churches will fold once their fickle consumers -- baby boomers and Generation Xers -- fall out of love with the product on offer. If it's lights, video and music that attracts them to God, he reasons, their staying power will last only until the next bright, shiny thing comes along and catches their attention. "Will today's cutting-edge pastor suddenly find himself stampeded by the herd tomorrow?" he asks.

But Sweet argues that this particular turning is actually a return to the past, to medieval forms of worship. Multimedia is a throwback to a pre-literate culture, he says, before the Protestant Reformation, before the invention of the printing press, when churchgoers read images -- church paintings, stained glass windows, tapestries -- instead of words.

"Images and metaphors are so much deeper and more complex than words," says Sweet. "It's the most primary language -- when you dream, do you dream in words? The natural language of your mind is metaphors and images."

What would Jesus do? Lord knows he employed occasional dramatic flair, if not mind-bending feats of faith, in his appearances before crowds of heathens and believers alike. Would he approve of soundboards, JumboTrons and movie clips? Impossible to say, but theoretically, the media-friendly ministers will find out -- if not in this world, then in another.

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