There are possible secular analogues to the church format, but there aren't many close secular analogues that don't derive from some kind of totalizing ideology. Church is very explicitly set up to propagate received wisdom (and to reinforce it with ritual, etc.), and the secondary social structures that accrete around churches (daycare-like services, church outings, community services, etc.) would most likely have a harder time existing if they couldn't fall back on the shared experience of receiving wisdom from on high. More cynically, there's also less incentive to maintain those secondary organizations if you're not trying to keep your flock socially isolated in order to benefit from cult attractor effects.
There's certainly a social void that not going to church leaves in some individuals. With the above in mind, though, the most adaptive way to fill it might not be to copy the church format but to expand the secondary services around existing secular organizations. The key here is leveraging the existing common ground to build affective links in a structured way: my current dojo, for example, has taken to throwing parties after intensive training sessions and on the dates of events significant to the organization. It's at least been effective at improving regular attendance, which strikes me as a good proxy for emotional attachment.
If you wanted to make something up from whole cloth, patterning it roughly after the Boy Scouts or something similar might not be a bad way to do it. Alternately, a modernized revival of the 19th-century "gentleman's club" format (i.e. not a strip joint but a venue for making and maintaining socially useful connections) might have potential.
I've experienced something like the "gentleman's club," more than once, and I can attest that it is a good institution. You have to have a critical mass of people you not only like but admire, people who are involved in things that you want to be involved in -- not just friends but connections. You have to see each other more regularly than once a week. You have to have a place that is frequently open to hang out on the spur of the moment. And booze (or intoxicants of your choice) is more important than you might imagine.
If you can get all this, then very good things happen in your life, very quickly. It's sort of setting up the conditions that make serendipity possible.
In the comments of a recent thread, another poster pointed out that religious individuals tend to report higher levels of happiness than nonreligious individuals. I suggested that the social network of churches, rather than the direct effects of theistic belief, might be responsible for this difference, and after doing a bit of searching around to see if the available studies support such an explanation, found a study that indicates that this is indeed the case.
Religious churches may be far from optimal in the services they provide to communities, but they have a great positive impact on the lives of many individuals. And not just as friendly social gatherings and occasional providers of community service; I've known priests who were superb community organizers and motivational speakers, who played an important role for their congregations to which I know of no existing secular analogue.
It seems probable that a secular organization could effectively play the same role in a community, but would anyone be likely to take it seriously? Since people who're already religious may be inclined to reject the value of a secular authority filling the role of a church, and atheistic individuals may not be inclined to attend, either due to reversing the stupidity of religion, or due to asocial and anticooperative values, it's uncertain whether a secular organization that adequately filled the role of a church would get off the ground in the first place in the present social climate.
So, what are your feelings on the prospect of secular church analogues? Do you think that they're appropriate or practical? Do you expect them ever to become common in real life?