This past Sunday, The New York Times ran a story about Rev. A. R. Bernard.

I was drawn to the article, in part, because of the call-out quote. It said, “A Brooklyn church with more than 30,000 members is run with corporate efficiency. And the pastor has the mayor’s ear.” This caught my eye because we don’t usually think about megachurches being in New York City, but of course there are a number of them. Then I wondered, “Why don’t we hear about this church like we do Joel Osteen’s Lakewood or Rick Warren’s Saddleback?” In part, this may be because the Christian Cultural Center (CCC) is a predominantly African American church run by an African American pastor. While President Obama broke the color barrier for the presidency, the same is not yet true about the visibility of black pastors versus white ones. Sure we see Creflo Dollar and T.D. Jakes, but were they asked to the inauguration? Are they on Time’s list of most influential people or do they sit across the desk from Larry King on a regular basis? (Okay, T.D. Jakes was endlessly on Dr. Phil, but that’s because they were developing a new show for him.)

The lack of visibility could be attributed to African American churches — even megachurches — being fundamentally different from their white brethren. They aren’t all in the South, and they aren’t traditionally as conservative. When you aren’t controversial, you don’t get the media attention.

In the case of CCC, they use noncontroversial megachurch characteristics such as using Disney consultants (who Pastor Bernard switched to after first reviewing the sales manual for Amex) and small groups, but shy away from contentious characteristics like prosperity preaching. This has been a recipe for success and growth, which is what is most important because size is what leads power and ultimately to the ear of the powerful.

Perhaps, then, it doesn’t matter that these churches have not been in the spotlight and, perhaps, that is changing.

This morning Ad Age, one of advertising’s leading trade publications, did a story on marketing religion. I guess this means that the topic has finally hit the big time.

Churches Get Religion on Marketing focuses on traditional churches’ concerns that they are losing the young generation — those elusive 18-34 year olds that marketers of all persuasions covet. (If you remember from prior posts the friars, too, were also looking for young applicants but in their case a specifically male audience.)

To lure this particularly fickle cohort, the United Methodist Church has launched a $20 million advertising campaign — not an unsubstantial sum of money. With the message to “Rethink Church,” the campaign is an attempt to re-frame church as more active experience by using a combination of non-traditional media:

Street teams, door hangers, T-shirts, Twitter and Facebook are included as campaign media, along with network TV, radio print, mobile, e-mail, outdoor and event sponsorships. The efforts all point back to the website www.10thousanddoors.org, where users can do everything from posting prayer requests and purchasing malaria nets for charity to finding daycare.

I find the idea of making church more active, more integrated, more participatory particularly interesting given my latest research (and something that was part of my long and very pleasant conversation with the reporter of this piece — “Mara Epstein” in the piece is in fact me in case you were wondering — this mistake has since been fixed). Churches are starting to realize that they need to take ownership of those things that make them different. What can a church give people that the consumer culture can not? One of those things (among many others) is service. Churches need to jump on this idea because brand companies have been co-opting this attribute at an increasing rate. Whether it’s Product (RED) (buy a t-shirt and you help people dying of AIDS in Africa) or Nike’s Human Race (run a race and money goes to one of three charities of your choice) or hundreds of other “buy-a-product-help-the-world” campaigns, branding companies are monopolizing social causes and religious institutions are going to find themselves left out in the cold.

Teaching how to “do service” is something that this generation is searching for. If churches want to tract this “religious consumer,” they need to position themselves as the authority on service and they need to do it now before Corporate America — and Barack Obama for that matter — beat them to it.