If the pastor had ever wanted to channel his inner Oprah, this was his chance.

“You ready to give a car away?” Stephen Chandler boomed into his microphone, bouncing in his boots at the altar Sunday.

And then the pastor did it again. And later that day, he would do it again. And again. Five free cars in all, handed out to the lucky winners at Destiny Church in Columbia, Md., on Sunday.

“We were just going for something you would not expect a church to do,” Chandler said. “This is something you would not expect a church to do.”

It was part marketing ploy — but also theology, Chandler said. Randomly giving away cars to people who show up to worship demonstrates God’s unbelievable, no-strings-attached goodness, Chandler preached.

And it sure helps get people in the door on a Sunday morning.

The free-car promotion was Destiny Church’s out-of-the-box idea for drumming up attendance at its first official Sunday in its new location, a building in a Columbia strip mall that the seven-year-old nondenominational church recently moved into after several years of meeting in a high school auditorium.

The predominantly African American church normally draws 1,000 to 1,100 attendees each Sunday, Chandler said. This week, the 2,250 tickets the church gave away online for three services  all filled up in advance; the church added a fourth service...READ MORE