From The Washington Times: mainline Protestant denominations adopt Madison Avenue techniques in effort to stem decades of membership losses and stay afloat.

The United Methodist Church recently released a $20 million rebranding effort aimed at attracting younger members to the large but diminishing Protestant sect. The new ads will appear over the next four years as part of the denomination’s “Rethink Church” campaign.

The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America has invested nearly $1.2 million in the past two years launching a similar branding effort based on the theme “God’s Work, Our Hands.”

From 1990 to 2008 alone, mainline Protestants dropped from 18.7 percent to 12.9 percent of the population, according to the American Religious Identification Survey.