Please rise as you are able and join me in singing the first hymn. The words are on the PowerPoint slides in front of you: “We gather together to ask the Lord’s blessing. . .”

Using computers in services instead of hymnals is just one way technology is changing how many Americans worship, particularly in fast-growing independent Christian churches. At NewSong Community Church, founded nine years ago just outside Columbus, Ohio, PowerPoint slides and video clips are regular parts of the service. For Rick Vilardo, NewSong’s pastor — and, full disclosure, a friend’s husband — these are the candles and incense of a modern church. And he says using “some of the same technology people use in their offices Monday through Friday” helps make Sunday services more relevant and accessible.

With about 75 members, Vilardo’s small evangelical congregation doesn’t qualify as a suburban megachurch, some of which draw thousands of people every weekend. But they have much in common, including a willingness to embrace new technology to help spread the gospel — sometimes from the pulpit, and sometimes in the back offices.

Religious groups are much like secular institutions when it comes to finding their way in this increasingly digital and online society. As in other sectors, decentralized, entrepreneurial organizations, particularly the independent evangelical “startups,” have adapted and adopted much more quickly than large, hierarchical ones with well-established faith traditions and habits.

Blogs, e-mail lists, Facebook groups and entire events are devoted to helping these newer churches make use of the latest technology to spread the word and boost membership. Sessions at the Internet Ministry Conference next week in Grand Rapids, Mich., will range from Web and e-mail publishing tools to setting up virtual ministries in Second Life — a popular online world in which millions of subscribers create “avatars” to interact in a game-like alternate reality. Several evangelical groups are active in Second Life already.

“Web 2.0, blogs, RSS, instant messaging, cell phones — these ideas and tools are revolutionizing the way our culture communicates,” the conference Web site proclaims. “It’s time they revolutionized the way we share the Gospel.”

The real revolution may be happening in church offices, where computer applications are changing the ways many congregations do business. This is where many evangelical groups have carefully studied the tools and practices of private-sector marketing and replicated them in churches large and small.

One such application was first developed by the Fellowship Church of Grapevine, Texas, a large evangelical congregation that now has more than 20,000 members attending services weekly at five campuses: four in Texas, one in Miami. Eight years ago, the church began working on a software suite to help it manage its growing membership. Now a spinoff venture, Fellowship Technologies of Irving, Texas, markets those applications as a hosted Web service for hundreds of other subscribing churches.

The Fellowship One service works much like Salesforce, the private sector’s leading customer relations management tool. For a church, however, a “customer” means something entirely different — as does the “product,” of course. But the relationship problem is very similar. So instead of tracking current and prospective clients and managing a sales team’s contacts with that person or organization, the Fellowship software, in the words of its Web site, monitors a church community’s visitors and members in their progress toward becoming “full-time followers of Christ.” A “check-in” feature allows leaders to monitor and analyze attendance, check on the whereabouts of children and manage volunteers. It also watches over contributions and has workflow tools for overseeing contacts with current and potential members and for coordinating church events. Subscription prices vary, depending on the level of service a church wants and its TWA — or “Typical Worship Attendance.”

All this will sound a little too corporate to some, especially those who don’t like to be on the receiving end of such targeted marketing. The combination of religion and technology makes some people particularly squeamish, perhaps because of the highly personal nature of spirituality — and the impersonal nature of data aggregation.

Technology advocates say religious leaders have always made use of new tools to share their messages, from the printing press to TV. And while evangelical churches are ahead of most religious organizations in using databases and online communications to cultivate membership, they are not the only ones thinking about it. The Unitarian Universalist church that my wife and I attend in the Washington suburbs, for instance, recently began posting weekly podcasts of sermons and services on its Web site. And the minister there, the Rev. Mary Katherine Morn, reports that most new visitors tell her they listened to a service online before deciding to attend in person.

God, like technology, sometimes works in mysterious ways.

Mark Stencel is deputy publisher and a technology columnist for Governing magazine, published by Congressional Quarterly Inc.