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Langley, B.C. pastor Jim Gaull slips into his running shoes and goes jogging three times a week, often along the scenic paths of Vancouver's Stanley Park.

It's a solo activity, but Mr. Gaull, 63, says he is joined by a very powerful workout partner.

"I invite God to go with me on my runs," Mr. Gaull said. "It's kind of like going running with a friend."

By literally exercising religiously, Mr. Gaull has shed 95 pounds (43 kilograms) from his original 290-pound frame over the past two years.

Over the same period, his fellow pastor Colin Griffiths, 59, of the Creekside Community Church has lost about 50 of his original 200 pounds.

And as they have slimmed down, the two church leaders have asked the rest of their congregation to follow their lead.

Members of their Creekside Losers Society - the church weight-loss group created by the pastors - run, walk and cycle individually and in informal groups, swapping motivational e-mails to encourage each other to stick to their fitness goals. In the past 1½ years, the society's 46 members have lost a total of 1,354 pounds.

They're not alone.

These days, churches from a variety of Christian denominations are taking a greater interest in the physical well-being of their followers, leading weight-loss groups, hosting fitness classes and forming recreational sports teams to whip congregations into shape.

The movement has exploded in the United States, where a growing number of churches are creating "sports ministries" and building gyms and recreational centres to address the health concerns of their members as the rates of diabetes, obesity and heart disease soar.

Churches across Canada are following suit.

At the Fairview Alliance Church in Montreal, about a dozen church members and people from the community gather two to three times a week for a free exercise class, dubbed "Walk Away the Pounds."

In the church foyer, they follow a fitness DVD on a big-screen television, stomping and stretching in synch. "As people get older, we need to take care of ourselves better. So that was the idea," said Lito Espinosa, a member of the church's board of elders who initiated the class.

Most of Fairview Alliance's 150 regular members are now in their 40s or older, he said, adding that a number of them "could use some exercise."

Health aside, the class offers an opportunity for church members to bond with each other and connect with the rest of the community, he said. The sessions are open to the public."Those who come regularly, we get to know each other better and share some of the joys and challenges one goes through," Mr. Espinosa said.

And all that sweat makes a congregation spiritually stronger, Mr. Gaull added. "God cares about the whole person, which is the physical, the emotional, the spiritual, the mental," he said. "To me, you can't really be everything you can be in other aspects of your life unless you've got the physical thing together."

Despite preaching that the body is a temple, Christian leaders have long played down the importance of physical health in favour of spiritual matters, until now, Mr. Griffiths said.

"Church communities went down that road and it became a theological issue [to separate] the spiritual dimension and the physical dimension," he said. "I think over time, that connection has been rediscovered, but for a long time churches just had that disconnect."

A major motivation behind that change has been the need for churches to attract new members, said Bob Johnston, director of Pickering, Ont.-based SU Sportz, a Christian organization that advises churches on how to establish sports programs.

Over the summer, Mr. Johnston worked with about 25 churches in Ontario and a couple in Alberta, assisting them in planning sports ministries, training church staff and designing church gyms and recreational facilities.

"What I'm seeing here in Canada is that churches need to use a tool to reach out to the community," Mr. Johnston said. "You figure the number of people who are involved in sports on Sunday mornings ... this is a great way for a church to come along and say, we can go out on their playing field in a non-threatening way."

Religion and athletics have become so intertwined that some newly built churches are now more like multipurpose rooms that can double as places of worship and as gyms, Mr. Johnston said.

One of the new churches he is currently assisting, Waterloo, Ont.-based Creekside Church (unrelated to the Creekside Community Church in B.C.), has a gym, a soccer field and a fishing pond where members can hold fishing derbies in the summer.

"Everything is built around the athletic world," Mr. Johnston said, adding that the design is strategic to the church's location in a new subdivision in the city. "You have all these new families coming in and the first thing they're looking for is athletics," he said.

At the Creekside Losers Society in B.C., Mr. Gaull and Mr. Griffiths said their recent emphasis on fitness has been, above all else, personally rewarding.

Both pastors said they feel more energetic, more available to their congregation and better able to carry out their religious work now that they're in better shape.

"It's really a stewardship matter," Mr. Gaull said. "We can live longer and we can love longer."