Posted 6:29 AM by Gene

"I consider ourselves evangelical, too," Mr. Buford said, "but for a different market segment."

Yes, for people who go to "church" so they don't have to.

These superliberal social clubs have fallen into a deadly trap: they use advertising because their product can't sell itself.

In 160 test churches, first-time attendance rose 14 percent in the denomination and overall worship attendance rose by 6 percent.

Pitiful. Who was measuring attendance? Did they station little old ladies with counters at the doors? And what about at the franchises they didn't "test"? Here's another deadly trap the social clubs have fallen into: to invent statistics to justify their advertising.

The Episcopal Diocese of Washington is spending $9,000 for the theater ads that appear several times before the start of a movie. Images direct viewers to WeWelcomeYou.org, a diocesan Web site that includes information on various churches, links to their sites, articles about worshipping in an Episcopal church and a short on-line movie about the diocese.

One ad shows a man wearing a dunce cap in a curled-up position atop a question mark beneath a headline: "Because Having Questions is not [SIC] a Sin."

How can an owner of social clubs talk of sin when it's eliminated it from the premises?

No, I forgot: there IS a sin in Episcopal social clubs: investing in ISRAEL.