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Without warning, the Sunday night church service at Frontline Silver Spring begins at 7 p.m. with four clicks of the drumsticks and a loud power chord.

That's the signal for about 150 congregants, seated in bleachers and floor seats at the Round House Theater on Colesville Road, to stand, sing along with lyrics posted on a giant projector screen and praise the Lord with Frontline's very own house rock band.

Some of the congregants, dressed in jeans, trendy scarves, flannel sweaters and hats, close their eyes and reach to the sky, loudly indulging lead singer Ashley Kelsey when she shouts out "All together now!" or "Let me hear you!"

With national statistics showing that young adults are going to church less and ignoring religion more, Frontline, a church strictly for young adults, prides itself on taking anything but a traditional approach to faith.

"Christianity is supposed to be a lifestyle, not just a building you come to once a week," said Todd Adkins, 33, the executive director of Frontline, which is the young-adult arm of Washington, D.C., area Christian megachurch McLean Bible Church.

"People our age are not just going to sit in a pew the way their parents did."

One quarter of the nation's young adults — those between ages 18 and 29 — say they have no religious affiliation, according to the Pew Research Center, a Washington, D.C., nonprofit that published its U.S. Religious Landscape Survey in 2008. Yet Frontline has enlisted thousands of the region's young adults with community service, Facebook and Twitter, and music that's more MTV than church choir.

Changing the world

Frontline began holding services in May at its Silver Spring location, which is its third satellite campus and first in Maryland. While about 2,000 a week attend the Tysons Corner campus and about 500 attend the Arlington, Va., campus, the Silver Spring campus, which costs about $200,000 a year to operate, draws in the range of 150 to 200 people. (The numbers pale in comparison to McLean Bible's main campus in Tysons Corner, which draws more than 10,000 followers weekly.)

With a budget of more than $20 million, McLean Bible will soon expand to several others locations as part of a 10-year plan that will eventually blanket the region and establish a brand name that expands beyond its parent church's Virginia-based namesake.

"I grew up in the church for a long time," University of Maryland student Gopi Naramy, 22, said after a Nov. 15 Frontline Silver Spring service. Naramy also attends The Gathering, McLean Bible's college-campus ministry located at four area universities. "But there's something about the way McLean does worship that I connect with."

That connection transcends time and proximity, as evident at the Nov. 15 service in Silver Spring, when, after a half hour of live music, a sermon that Frontline Pastor Todd Phillips recorded at an earlier service in Tysons Corner is played on a giant projector screen.

On stage, Phillips looks more like a stand-up comedian than a pastor. He is wearing a headset microphone, jeans and a striped button-down shirt with the top three buttons undone. He makes jokes about the recent apocalyptic blockbuster movie "2012," which congregants have e-mailed him about.

"People ask me about 2012 and I say, ‘I'm actually on God's end-times committee, it's good you asked,'" Phillips says sarcastically as laughs erupt both in Tysons Corner and Silver Spring.

The levity is short-lived.

"I don't know when [the apocalypse is] going to happen," Phillips says, his mood sobering. "I'm not on the date and time committee, I'm on the ‘change the world until it comes' committee."

"Changing the world" is something Frontline takes seriously. Frontline began as the vision of McLean Bible's senior pastor, the Rev. Lon Solomon, who wanted to turn Washington, D.C., the "mecca" for America's young leaders, into a vehicle for spreading Christianity, Adkins said.

Critics have said McLean Bible and Solomon have been too aggressive in pursuing converts. While Adkins didn't deny the conversion efforts, he said the criticism is overblown.

"We don't care who you are — Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, whatever — we think you need Jesus Christ," said Adkins, who lives in Falls Church, Va. "... We don't say, ‘Hey go out and talk to your Jewish friends,' we say, ‘Go out and talk to your friends.'"

As Phillips put it in his Nov. 15 sermon, simply attending church isn't enough.

"A lot of us have been speed-dating the church rather than buying in fully," Phillips said to his congregants.

Phillips challenged his congregants rather than preaching to them, an attitude that appeals to young adults, Adkins said. He won't go as far as calling it a "marketing campaign," but Adkins said there is a proven strategy to reaching younger generations: community service, social events and embracing technology when most churches turn away.

With greater time constraints, no children to guide spiritually and no parents to impose spirituality, young adults naturally aren't as involved in the church as older generations, Frontline congregants say. And with the transient nature of the D.C. area's young adults, "the desire for community is heightened because people aren't living near their families," said Mike Kelsey, 27, the campus pastor at Silver Spring.

Frontline Silver Spring holds mid-week Bible studies at Mayorga Coffee Factory on Georgia Avenue and participates monthly in intramural dodgeball at Montgomery College's Silver Spring campus. But it also holds holiday donation drives and charity events. Web users can watch sermons live on Frontline's Web site, which also features Facebook pages and Twitter feeds for each campus and an online collection service.

"It's an opportunity to reach out to non-believers," Silver Spring resident Jamie White, 30, said of the extracurricular events. "This is what we are here for, to impact lives for Christ, whether it's through dodgeball or drinking coffee."

Breaking down tradition

When Phillips said many congregants were "speed-dating" the church, it actually echoed some of the criticism against Frontline: that its appeal derives more from bells and whistles than righteousness.

"We exist as a church to spread the gospel, that has to drive what we do," said Kelsey. "But the activities do get in the way of the message sometimes."

They may go against Christian traditions, but Adkins says Frontline's congregants simply won't conform to certain beliefs if it will compromise their goals or the message they want to spread.

But the balance of reaching young adults while still espousing traditions does become tricky when longstanding Christian beliefs differ from those of a younger generation, Adkins said.

"We have the traditional conservative view that abortion is not right and homosexuality is not God's best for you," Adkins said. "... But we are careful not to just say ‘This is wrong,' but careful to say why we believe it's wrong."

But some congregants say it's that independence, both against traditional Christian services and against public opinion, which puts young adults in Frontline seats and then forces them to rise out of them when the music begins.