For Sunday night services of The Wilderness, the high-vaulted ceiling of St. John’s Episcopal Cathedral shimmers with purple and green light effects, like an indoor aurora borealis.

Below, dozens of candles flicker near icons in the dark nave. Incense hangs in the air. Congregants can choose to sit in a pew or on thick cushions at the foot of a simple altar. A stringed Moroccan oud gives even traditional songs of praise an exotic twist, but there is also world music, chant and jazz.

“We’re using the cathedral in new ways, making it more inviting and even sensual,” said the Rev. Peter Eaton. “It’s meant to celebrate and bring alive all the human senses. We think that, in metro Denver, there is nothing else like us.”

Episocopal attendance has been dwindling at the national and diocesan level. Eaton hopes The Wilderness is the ticket for uninspired Protestants, disaffected Catholics and other spiritual seekers who want a more mystical and meditative feeling than what big-box churches or traditional Protestant services provide.

“We have what everybody else is wanting,” said Eaton, St. John’s dean and rector. “We have the theological depth and breadth of a 2,000-year-old spiritual tradition. . . . Yet we also have exploration of new language and religious experience.”

The Wilderness is gaining disciples, roughly 100 so far. Like many mainline Protestant denominations, the Episcopal Church has been been bleeding enrollment in Colorado and nationwide.

“The Wilderness has been a revitalizing force at St. John’s,” said parishioner James Wall, a co-founder along with Sub- Dean Poulson Reed. “We’re a passionate bunch . . . bringing new life into this stuffy, old building.”

Swifter currents

The Wilderness is bishop-approved Episcopalianism, but it seeks to be somewhat unconventional — a mainstream church exploring some swifter, smaller religious currents.

The Wilderness is riding one evangelical trend — small niche Christian congregations called emergent churches — and bucking another — the megachurch.

The emergent church, a form of evangelism that took root in the U.S. in the 1990s, generally attempts to attract congregants 18-30 years old or some other constituency aloof to the institutional church.

Many of these boutique churches say they return to Christianity’s early roots. Many incorporate elements of mysticism and social activism. Each seeks to offer something different from what’s already out there.

The Wilderness service, Eaton said, offers ancient tradition, classical liturgy, rich musical heritage, sensual setting — all this and wide-open minds.

“We’re trying to explore new ways of worshiping,” he said.

The “sermon” is sometimes a sermon, sometimes a conversation, and sometimes a short film or a slide show. After church, the congregation adjourns to a nearby pub to continue the discussion.

When The Wilderness was launched in late 2007, there was concern among some parishioners about using one of the oldest churches in Denver for something of an experiment.

“Some called us the New Age service,” Wall said. “Others predicted we’d be gone in a year.”

Yet the congregation, which fluctuates between attendance of 85 and 130 for most of the 6 p.m. Sunday services, is larger in its second year than two of the cathedral’s four Sunday morning services, which together draw 750 to 800.

“We’re bringing new people into the cathedral,” Wall said.

But The Wilderness is not trying to grow a huge congregation, Eaton said.

“We don’t actually think this is going to be everybody’s thing,” Eaton said. “One size does not fit all anymore. We have to be open, nimble and flexible.”

Yet The Wilderness has attracted all age groups.

“It’s really different,” 23-year-old Reggie White said. “It’s really contemporary, yet calm and collected. I love the music. I feel God here more than any other place.”

Break from Catholicism

Maria and Charlie Girsch, who renewed their 40-year-old marriage vows here Feb. 8, enjoyed nearly lifelong membership in the Catholic Church. They still love many facets of the faith, yet struggle with issues such as priest celibacy, the role of women in the church, the treatment of gays and papal authority.

“We’re still Catholic enough to want a Eucharistic experience,” Charlie Girsch said. “The Wilderness preserves what we love about Catholicism. I think we have found a safe harbor for wounded, roaming Catholics.”

In Colorado, at least a couple dozen emergent churches, such as Scum of the Earth, Pathways and The Next Level Church, try to provide a niche for postmodern Christians. The best guess for the number of national communities is several hundred. The movement is hard to quantify because it is not at all institutional, although some congregations are affiliated with traditional denominations or given space at a church or megachurch.

“We purposely do not track numbers,” movement leader Tony Jones said. “That’s one of the sins of the modern church — an emphasis on numeric growth over spiritual growth.”

Jones, national coordinator of the Emergent Village online network, is not certain highly structured denominations, such as the Episcopal Church, can really offer an emergent community in the true sense of the movement.

“You can start with some edgy worship, but you really have to push deeper than that,” Jones said. “It’s a mistake that ’emergent’ is about changing worship. It’s about changing the ethos of an entire church. They don’t really have the freedom to do that.”

According to a 2008 survey by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, 28 percent of American adults have left the faith in which they were raised in favor of another religion or no religion at all. The primary beneficiaries of the fluid faithful have been evangelical churches, many nondenominational.

“In the mainline denominations,” Eaton said, “we have always compared our church life to megachurches, asking, ‘Why aren’t we growing like megachurches?’

“We didn’t want to keep giving people more of the same, but we didn’t want to sell out to the evangelical culture of praise bands and auditoriums.”

Besides losing members to evangelical churches, the Colorado Episcopal Diocese, which has about 30,000 members, has had at least 16 congregations either leave the diocese or form outside the diocese to affiliate instead with conservative Anglicans.

The number of Americans who said they attended church at least once a week was 39 percent in 2008, Pew reported. In 1970, that figure was 38 percent. Yet the number of people who seldom or never attend church has climbed sharply in the same four decades, from 12 percent to 27 percent. Competition is stiff for these unaffiliated souls.

In a nation where denominational loyalty has been on the wane for decades, filling hearts and pews requires savvy market research and good salesmanship, wrote University of Florida advertising professor James Twitchell in the 2007 book “Shopping for God: How Christianity Went From in Your Heart to in Your Face.”

Wilderness founders do not express such a businesslike perspective, although they admit to doing market research by visiting emergent churches.

“We were undercover Episcopalians,” Wall said. “We checked out some of the more trendy churches.”

But The Wilderness is not just good marketing; it’s good religion, Eaton said.

“People are getting tired of a service that is all contemporary music and no theological depth,” he said. “We look back, and we also look forward. We understand the power of ritual. We also want to be proclaiming the Gospel afresh in each generation.”

Electa Draper: 303-954-1276 or edraper@denverpost.com

This article has been corrected in this online archive. Originally, due to an editing error, it incorrectly stated that attendance at the parish had been dwindling. In fact, it is enrollment in the Episcopal Church at the national and diocesan level that has been declining.