Network Ten's controversial new program Good Sex, which is made by the Anglican Church in Sydney, along with enterprises such as the Queensland-produced Embrace are part of a bold approach by many Christian groups to promote their message using marketing tactics they have criticised the secular media for in the past – particularly the focus on celebrity and sex – to reach more receptive and bigger audiences.

Embrace was launched this month in a bid to capitalise on the 20,000 women who attend Christian conferences around the country. Once it has a foothold in what manager Mark Badham calls the "great untapped market", he hopes to sell it on newsstands, pitched at a wider readership. Badham, who runs Mark 4:8 Strategic Communications and employs a team of Pentecostal editorial staff, has entered the market with a print run of 10,000.

"Traditional Christian magazines have been owned by faith denominations and they see them as a form of ministry," he says. "But this is different. We are building a celebrity factor into the magazine so people are attracted to the cover and then we're giving them the ministry inside."

The strategy, he says, is built on the back of a change in Australia's religious demographic. Gone is the stereotypical musty do-gooder reading his or her church's monthly newsletter; the new Christian is often a young person attending a charismatic denomination who expects modern content with a sharper image.

"Australia is experiencing a dramatic shift in its religious landscape, with people flocking to high-energy, contemporary Pentecostal and Evangelical churches, while most traditional churches are experiencing significant decline," Badham says.

"We've got to keep up with this."

Mark Hadley, director of radio and TV for Anglican Media Sydney and the innovator behind Good Sex, agrees. "The church has to keep up with change. In the 1950s when people wanted to communicate they hired halls and had speakers. In Australia that led to large events like the Billy Graham crusade," he says. "Now people exchange ideas in the mass media. It has become extremely important for the church to grapple with that and use the mass techniques that are available. If we don't keep up with the change in technology we will be communicating with an ever-diminishing group of people."

Good Sex, on sabbatical from its 11.30pm timeslot to make room for Big Brother Up Late until July 28, features Christian panellists including sexologist Patricia Weerakoon and advertising copywriter Janet Evans talking frankly across issues such as orgasms, pornography and cyber-dating and has another eight episodes to run. So novel is the approach, it has attracted the attention of The Washington Post and London's The Times.

After it was offered the late-night timeslot by Ten, the team at Anglican Media decided to forgo the usual tele-evangelism and create a new show. They had to find something that would appeal to 25-to-35 year-old men, the carry-over audience inherited from Sports Tonight in the earlier slot.

"Some people say it's terribly hypocritical using sex to sell the gospel but we think there is something viable to discuss. People are interested in sex," says Hadley. "We have to adapt to the way people are living. With society focused on the sexual smorgasbord we think there is room there for a sex program being used as a means to tell people about God."

Few religious groups have the financial firepower of the Sydney Anglicans. Their media unit, under the Evangelical drive of Archbishop Peter Jensen, produces the church's biggest newspaper, the monthly Southern Cross, with a readership of 44,000, as well as three websites, 30 hours of TV programming a year and 20 half-minute or one-minute radio spots a year.

In the scramble for a slice of the internet action a few years ago, the charismatic and Pentecostal churches decided against joining the larger mainstream National Council of Churches, forming a new group, the Australian Christian Churches, instead.

They found themselves outmanoeuvred, however, by the Sydney Anglicans in a race to register the domain names Christianity.net and Christianity.org. The move caused some angst, not only with the new group but with members of the NCC as well, who saw the exclusivity of the move as . . . well, less than charitable.

It wasn't seen to be in the spirit of Christianity, says ABC Radio religious commentator John Cleary. Many thought the council should have been the body to register the names on behalf of the traditional churches.

The anecdote might sound like background static to the main tunes being played by the religious media, but it illustrates the cultures and currents at work. "There is an undercurrent of bitter trench warfare out there that is sometimes papered over," says Cleary, who presents the ABC's Sunday Nights program.

Church attendances are down for the main Anglican and Protestant denominations but the drop appears to have been offset largely by rises in Evangelical (Baptist, Churches of Christ) and Pentecostal (Assemblies of God and Christian City Church) denominations, according to the latest National Church Life Survey.

With this increasing influence of the Evangelical and fundamentalist movements has come greater use of mass communications and an ability to tap into new media.

While mainstream churches struggle for their place on commercial television – the Australian Churches Media Association's Reverend John Dalziel says it is currently pressing the Australian Broadcasting Authority to exercise its clout and force more reasonable viewing times for religious programs – the country's only dedicated Christian television channel is broadcasting 24 hours a day on cable channel Optus.

The Maroochydore-based Australian Christian Channel, backed by small independent churches, is financed largely by a Queensland businessman, Mike Jeffs, who runs a cellular phone company. Jeffs, says general manager Neil Elliott, started the channel five years ago when after an encounter with God he "felt the calling". It is run as a not-for-profit organisation and also depends on donations but does not solicit on air for funds, unlike similar channels overseas.

Content on the Australian Christian Channel is about 20 per cent local with the rest coming from North America and Europe. Elliott says the most popular programs include worship from Christian City Church at Oxford Falls and the Hillsong Church, both in Sydney, as well as an American youth program crammed with music called Day 7.

The Hillsong independent church, headed by husband and wife pastors Brian and Bobbie Houston, has been remarkably adept at tapping into popular culture and attracting young people through its music. It has a congregation of about 15,000, produces a half-hour TV program that is shown in 120 countries, a quarterly magazine, CDS, DVDs and books.

Wes Jay, of Melbourne media consultancy Woodlands Media, says there has been an explosion in the Christian CD and DVD market. He estimates Hillsong has sold about 7 million records worldwide – that's about three times as many as Delta Goodrem. Nineteen Christian records have made it to gold or platinum status (sales of 35,000 and 70,000) and 12 of those have been from Hillsong.

Christian music was worth about $30 million last year.

Parallel to the explosion in religious music sales is the growing use of the internet and a searching for answers beyond the local parish and away from the traditional gatekeepers of spiritual information, the religious institutions.

About 80 per cent of Australian net traffic flows to overseas sites. Most visit the Gospel Communication Network, an alliance dedicated to spreading the gospel over the web, and Belief Net, which provides chat rooms and resources on a range of beliefs, according to online research company Hitwise. The 25-to-34 age group makes up nearly a third of all users. In Australia there are more than 150 Christian sites and scores of others on just about every topic, from paganism and Gnosticism to Zoroastrianism and Taoism.

Radio and books are the other spheres of influence. There was only one community radio licence awarded to a religious group 25 years ago, to 2CBA-FM in Sydney. Four more were added by 1992 – in Launceston, Perth, Hobart and Adelaide – and that was followed by an explosion in the late-1990s, with about 40 licences around the country today, says Phillip Randall, president of the Association of Christian Broadcasters.

The most popular religious website in Australia in April was that of book distributor Koorong Christian Products. Managing director of Koorong, Paul Bootes, says the industry is worth about $80 million and growing. Although he will not divulge how much of the market Koorong has, with 11 shops it is the largest distributor of Christian books. "It's growing because people are getting tired of living a materialistic lifestyle and are looking for a spiritual solution," says Bootes.

Cleary says some religious groups in Australia have borrowed strategies from the US, where many of the rapidly growing churches base their evangelism purely on marketing techniques. They survey an area, a demographic group, to find out what that group's aspirations are and then they build the church on that group. "It is taken to such an extreme that in many of these churches you'll find no religious symbols whatever, not even a cross . . . Once you take Christianity to that extreme, what is there left of the gospel? Nothing but a giant marketing exercise," says Cleary.

"Those sort of techniques are the sort of things that groups from Australia go to the states to learn about," and are pitched at Mark Latham's "aspirationals". Even a number of the larger, more traditionally conservative Evangelical denominations are influenced by American-style marketing.

"It's causing within groups like the Salvos and Baptists some tension over what the nature of the whole Christian enterprise is," says Cleary. "Is it to have mega-churches in which you've got 10,000 people hanging off the walls or is to be some sort of moral, social and cultural influence in the community?"

There was now a re-examination of this approach theologically, "but if you are out there in the pews at Hillsong or Christian City Church, these are still the dominant style".

However, Reverend John Henderson, general secretary of the National Council of Churches, says the figures on church attendance do not give the full story. While they show many more people are going into Pentecostal churches "they are also going out, sometimes at a faster rate".

He says traditional Australian religious institutions don't throw the kind of resources and money into media the way Americans do, although some churches are gradually upping the ante, taking their message to the forefront and "making it a little more transparent about who they are and what they stand for".

Snapshot of a broad church

The mainstream churches have always had a strong tradition in print media. Many publish state-based weekly tabloid newspapers with sizeable circulations such as the Catholic Leader in Brisbane (13,000). There are also monthly or quarterly magazines and newsletters. These include the Uniting Church's Journey magazine (16,000), and The Lutheran (8600). President of the Australian Religious Press Association, Reverend Robert Wiebusch of Adelaide, says there are about 195 publications. A number of churches are moving into online publishing to save costs.

ABC Radio has six religious programs, producing 13 hours of programming a week. The Religion Report on Radio National has the biggest audience, averaging 94,000 for 2003, and Encounter reaches 85,000 listeners. Other programs include The Spirit of Things, The Ark, and Sunday Nights with John Cleary, which have audiences in the 50,000 to 60,000 range; and For The God Who Sings on ABC Classic FM (36,000 for 2003).

Jesuit Publications produces three main magazines: Australian Catholics appears five times a year, has a circulation of 221,000 and is distributed to schools and parishes; the high quality monthly public affairs magazine Eureka Street; and the bi-monthly Our Madonna.

Among the most popular general religious publications is Alive, an independent non-denominational magazine published 11 times a year by Media Incorporated, which also produces the bi-monthly Australian Christian Woman.

Under commercial TV rules, 1 per cent of broadcast time needs to be religious content, which is equivalent to one hour a day. This can take the form of programs or spots in the schedule and stations have flexibility on the time these are shown. State Christian television associations and churches produce and pay for the production of programs and spots. A 15-second spot to air on Channel Nine in Victoria, for example, costs $600-$700.

The biggest selling religious book in Australia, apart from the Bible, is The Purpose-Driven Life by Californian pastor Rick Warren, founder of Saddleback Baptist Church. It has sold upwards of 100,000 copies in Australia (11 million worldwide). By way of comparison, the top-selling novel The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown has sold 160,000 copies.

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