“This is a fundamental shift in strategy,” said John Fea, a history professor at Christian Messiah College, who is nevertheless skeptical the effort will produce the desired results. “Rather than forcing this from the top down, this is about a grassroots approach to changing the culture by embedding ministers in local politics from the ground up,” he said.

One Sunday two years ago, Pastor Rob McCoy, who believes in banning abortion and gay marriage and putting prayer back in schools, stood at the pulpit of his California mega church and announced he was endorsing a political candidate: himself.

“Every single person in this room has been inculcated and trained to think that any time a pastor opens his mouth to talk about politics from the pulpit, somehow that’s wrong,” said the 51-year-old McCoy. “You’ve been taught incorrectly. There should be no other place that you should speak of it but from the pulpit.”

McCoy lost his bid for the California State Assembly but, with the help of 650 volunteers, mostly from his church, he later won a seat on the Thousand Oaks, California, city council.

McCoy represents a tactical shift within a Christian far right seeking to regain its political influence after losing several big battles in the so-called culture wars, including the Supreme Court ruling this year allowing gay marriage. That shift is being brought into sharp focus as activists prepare the battleground for the 2016 general election.

Aiming to motivate conservative Christians, they are focusing on smaller political races, local ballot initiatives and community voter registration drives.

At the center of the effort is the American Renewal Project, an umbrella group that says it has a network of 100,000 pastors. It is headed by evangelical Republican political operative David Lane, who wants to recruit 1,000 pastors to run for elected office in 2016.

So far, roughly 500 have committed to running, Lane told Reuters.

“This is a fundamental shift in strategy,” said John Fea, a history professor at Christian Messiah College, who is nevertheless skeptical the effort will produce the desired results. “Rather than forcing this from the top down, this is about a grassroots approach to changing the culture by embedding ministers in local politics from the ground up,” he said.

In some instances, pastors are trumpeting their candidacies or those of other evangelicals directly from the pulpit, in violation of Internal Revenue Service rules governing tax-exempt churches. Some are launching church-wide voter registration drives.

One, Brad Atkins, pastor of South Carolina’s Powdersville First Baptist Church, said he has just finished registering every eligible voter in his church of 300. “I even lick the envelope and stick on the stamp for them,” said Atkins.

Several of the pastors in Lane’s network were instrumental in last month’s defeat of Houston’s “transgender bathroom bill,” the local ordinance that banned discrimination against sexual orientation and gender identity in public places. The pastors united to decry the measure and encourage congregants to sign a petition that eventually put the new law to a ballot initiative, where it was voted down.

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White evangelicals make up about 20 percent of the U.S. population, according to the Public Religion Research Institute, and have long represented a key voting bloc for Republicans. While less organized as a national and cultural force than in the 1980s and 1990s under the leadership of Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority and the Christian Coalition, evangelicals still reliably turn out for presidential elections.

In 2004, they were instrumental in President George W. Bush’s re-election bid, when strategists made a concerted effort to mobilize them and used some of the voter registration strategies Lane advocates today. They turned out in similar numbers in 2008 and even 2012, when Mitt Romney, a Mormon who many evangelicals considered too moderate, was the Republican nominee, according to a report by the Pew Research Center.

In the runup to November 2016, Lane says he is holding conferences in hotels across the country nearly every week, bringing together thousands of far right pastors and their wives for two-day, all-expenses paid retreats. There are lectures on running political campaigns, turning out voters, and injecting sermons with a healthy dose of politics.

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