Tony Cummings (and others) report on Britain's Christian music institution, PHIL AND JOHN.

(Phil) "Yeah, at the moment on the Christian circuit everyone knows us as 'Phil & John' so it would be a bit daft to put a new band name on a poster - nobody would turn up to see us. But we'll be doing things outside of the Christian scene so we're going to go under the name of The Wood Thieves."

Humour has always been your trademark. What sort of responses do you get?"

(John) "Transcends everything from boredom to hysterical laughter!" (Phil) "You go to one place one night and people won't find it funny and you go to the next place, next night, and you can say anything and people will roll off their chairs. So there's definitely no rhyme or reason! I'm sure that's the same for all comedians. They have good nights and they have bad nights."

Has the on stage spontaneity and wackiness ever backfired on you?

(Phil) "Yes, quite a few times. I suppose that we have a set patter that we do every concert and then we go off at a tangent sometimes, try new things and quite often it falls a bit flat... then you just resort to a bit that you know works again; so sometimes we still die a death." (John) "With humour it could take a year to develop the story to take it in different directions, to make it funnier, to get the timing right. By the time you've got it right it's time to bring something new in!"

How do you go about working out your sketches and your routines?

(John) "We nick things from people and it just kinda builds up. We start off with a short hit that lasts for about a minute and by the time we've been going for about a year or so it lasts about six or seven minutes because we add little bits and stuff to it. We don't really work on it as such. This year, we've got a scriptwriter doing stuff for the tour this autumn to get some new material, some new ideas."

How far would you take the humour?

(Phil) "I would never say "bottom" (laughs). Yeah, there's a limit, isn't there? It's really hard I think 'cos most humour is tongue-in-cheek and innuendos."

There is also a serious intent beneath the humour. You seem to have a healthy disrespect for churchiness and hypocrisy and this comes over at your concerts.

(Phil) "If you look at the church in general it seems like it's totally lost touch with the world. For people who go to church it's all right because they're in a little clique and the people who've been to church all their lives know what to expect, so they kind of put up with it. But for the majority of people who've never been to church it's like a totally alien thing. Unfortunately, it seems to be making very few steps to bridging that gap." (John) "We're not having a profound impact on the world and so unless something changes, unless we start preaching Jesus maybe a little bit more rather than church politics or inter-denominations or church figures, I don't think we're going to see great growth. Because you talk to more non-Christians, especially around the universities and they're so anti-Christianity, because of what they've seen in churches. But when you start talking about Jesus and the gospel, they're so open, so somewhere along the line we need to do a massive PR exercise in getting the gospel across." (Phil) "The thing is, you look at Jesus, you read the Bible and there's no two ways about it, it's got the most sense as a code to live by and having a relationship with God and it all makes total sense and it's a brilliant ideal. But unfortunately, like John was saying, the church just totally misses it when it comes to putting that across. That's because people have got sandwiched into the hallelujahs, praise the Lord and swinging the incense round their heads that it's almost become more important than telling people about God."

Do you think music could be one of the things that bridges the gap in this country?

(Phil) "Oh, definitely. Music has a real affect on your spirit - from a piece of classical music to a piece of pop music, Christian, non-Christian, I think it opens people's spirits up and sometimes that's a bad thing because the spirit of the music might be really bad! But music is a great communicator, it's the best." (John) "I've never seen anything more positive or powerful than music and an evangelist at the same time. Speaking from experience when we've worked with someone like J John in universities we'd get five hundred non-Christian students at the end of the evening, they were all hooked, they just wanted to know more about Christianity. So somewhere along the line we need more evangelists, more musicians willing to go out and sing about Jesus, more churches willing to take risks with their money to invest in evangelism and to think of new ideas, not just the Sunday 6:30 gospel service! (Phil) "I think half the problem is the attitude 'we've always done it this way so why should we change?' A church decides they're going to have a mission so they have half an hour worship singing and then some guy rattles on for three quarters of an hour and that's what they call a mission. All they get is Christians turn up because they're too embarrassed to bring their non-Christian friends along. If you had events that were totally credible, at worst people would go away thinking 'that was a good night', at best they become Christians or want to learn more." (John) "That's our main aim when we do missions with J John, it's to make it as professional as we can, so they can't criticise that. They go away only thinking about Jesus, either accepting him or rejecting him. We don't want them to go away thinking 'the lights were really bad' or 'it sounded awful'. We just want them to think about the gospel. 'What do I do with Jesus?' I think that's what we need to do far more, put good things on at churches and invite people. Because it's true, it's the truth so it should hold up and it does hold up."