Revangelicals may be conservatives, but they have more freedom to adapt to the cultural mainstream than other tradition-minded denominations. True heirs to the spirit of the Reformation, they consider ritual less important than Gospel truth. So they guiltlessly tweak their presentation to suit specific audiences. Abroad, they obsessively translate the Bible into the vernacular. At home, they have less skillfully tailored their message to yuppie America’s therapeutic culture. That’s beginning to change. There’s a big movement to modernize the denomination’s recruitment techniques spearheaded by Rick Warren, the founding pastor of the Saddleback megachurch in Orange County, California. Warren’s book, The Purpose Driven Life, has been on the New York Times hardcover Advice and How-To best-seller list for 89 weeks. Warren denounces self-help movements and psychotherapy, but he really exhibits the tendencies he decries. His book is structured in the classic self-help style, describing a 40-day program for “discovering God’s purpose for my life.” New Age phrases like “spiritual growth” abound. His ministry leads Dr. Phil–like workshops on marriage enhancement, parenting, and budget planning.

Warren’s phrases echo through the slogans and literature of New York missionaries. They realize success in the city will require even more kinds of protective coloration: embracing New Age rhetoric, repackaging conservative Christianity as something resembling yoga. They blanket Hell’s Kitchen with postcards promising “holistic growth” and “lives transformed.” One card shows an unmade bed with orange pillows and an orange duvet. It asks, “Tired of waking up unsatisfied?”

Rourk wants to tap a fundamental truth about life in the big city. It should be ripe for revivals because it is filled with people living in isolation, searching for a sense of belonging. Even in the ballyhooed megachurches, like Rick Warren’s, the core of American Evangelical church life is not the large Sunday service but small group sessions that convene during the week in homes and cafés. Ostensibly structured for more intensive Bible study, these klatches of believers also have the character of group therapy. Rourk has taken these sessions and turned them into his biggest selling point, mentioning them at every turn. The 411 advertises that “these groups meet together to discuss spiritual issues and support one another in all aspects of life.” The church, he says constantly, will provide “authentic community.”

Rourk sends missionaries to laundromats to hand out quarters, a tactic he calls Underwear Outreach. At dog runs, they distribute biscuits. Subway riders get water, Starbucks, and Krispy Kremes.

And if those appeals don’t work, the Baptists will play to baser instincts. Rourk sends missionaries to laundromats to hand out quarters—a tactic he calls Underwear Outreach. At dog runs, they distribute biscuits. Subway riders get water, Starbucks, and Krispy Kremes. Rourk says, “We want to get people to stop and ask, ‘Who are these people and why are they being so nice to me?’ We tell them that there aren’t any strings attached to this gift. We aren’t asking anything in return.”

After a long search, Rourk found a semi-permanent home for his church, a small theater called the Peter Norton Space, on West 42nd Street. When he told me about the locale, he tried not to sound too morose about his co-tenant, a production of a play called The Oldest Profession, about retired whores. The play, he said, had at least provided him with a set that reinforced his favorite catchphrase, “The 411 is a city-loving church.” For the duration of The Oldest Profession’s run, Rourk will preach in front of a gritty street scene that features strewn rubbish, a park bench, and a graffiti-covered façade.

Rourk also needed to spin his church’s lackluster attendance. His grand-opening service pulled nearly 130—not a bad number. But by the third week, his audience had plummeted to 40. His attendees were hardly the coveted influencers of culture. There was Mario, a wheelchair-bound retired Cuban bongo player; two homeless men; and a raft of recent graduates from Christian colleges. But Rourk had an explanation for this, too. At seminary, he had studied “missiology”—a discipline that includes statistical analysis of church attendance. Missiology predicts that churches start slowly. Like restaurants, they need word-of-mouth and buzz.

While it is too early to judge Rourk’s effectiveness, other Evangelical churches have been open long enough to assess. On the East Side, Redeemer Presbyterian holds two Sunday services that often fill Hunter College’s 2,100-person auditorium. Since it launched in the late eighties, Redeemer has spun off sixteen branches in the city and suburbs. Where Redeemer most definitely sounds like the name of an Evangelical church, most of the Southern Baptist outfits do nothing to announce their true identity. (Rourk says that New Yorkers tend to recoil from the word church, let alone Southern Baptist, so it’s better not to use them.) There’s Graffiti on the Lower East Side, and the Journey with both downtown and Upper West Side congregations—all of which draw healthy crowds, usually close to 200.

When the academic Nancy Ammerman placed northeastern Evangelicals under the ethnographic microscope for her 1987 book Bible Believers, she found that they look a lot like the rest of the population—at least in their education, professions, and wealth. “People who join Evangelical churches in the north are not demographically weird,” she told me. And in a way, the New York Evangelicals aren’t so anomalous either. The churches draw from three main subgroups. They attract Asian-Americans, many of whom grew up in Evangelical households. Then there are southern expats, also looking for some comforts of homeland homily. A good number of longtime city dwellers, some of the NPR-listening, antiwar variety, have also joined.