An historic event in September seeks to engage Christians with the challenges, and opportunities, of today's media. Tony Cummings reports on THE CHURCH AND MEDIA CONFERENCE.

Joel Edwards

For years the media has seemed at the very margins of church activity or interest. Put on a conference about evangelism, or exploring the prophetic, or finding social expressions of the Christian faith, or going deeper into worship, and one would be likely to find all manner of Christians prepared to sign up and be fed. But The Church And The Media two day conference due to be held in Stoke-on-Trent on September 14th and 15th is truly an historic event going where no conference has gone before. Not only will it bring together a wide sweep of speakers both from the media - Rory and Wendy Alec of God Digital, Ted Baehr of Movie World USA, David Heron of Premier Radio, Ian Mackie and Gareth Littler of United Christian Broadcasters, Jonathan Bellamy of Cross Rhythms, Sam Gordon of TWC, Brian Cooke of HCJB - and the broader sweep of the Church -Joel Edwards of Evangelical Alliance, Gerald Coates of Pioneer and Alan Scotland of Lifelink -but it is also aimed at both the media professional and the church goer with no participation in media. The conference is the brainchild of Cross Rhythms CEO, Chris Cole. He observes, "The media is a realm that affects all our lives, yet it's one that in the past has received precious little teaching from churches and even less dialogue between those involved in the media and rank and file Christians.

"We've allowed our TVs, and radios, and movies, to drip feed us huge amounts of ideas, information and attitudes but made little attempt to reject that which is unbiblical and spiritually harmful. Even more alarming, the British have been starved of media that can provide food for the spirit as well as the mind. We might have the occasional religious programme untainted by the multi-faith political correctness of our time, or the occasional feature film that takes up issues of faith and morality. But by and large we've been starved of genuinely Christian media. Yet God is not unaware of what's been going on even if much of his Church has. Against all the odds, he's raised up a fledgling Christian media industry in the UK. It's engaged in a big struggle to keep its financial head above water. It's denied access to terrestrial airwaves by intransigent politicians and bureaucrats. It's even vilified by liberal elements in the Church as the preserve of fundamentalist Bible bashers. Yet despite all the odds, UK's Christian media has found growing grassroots amongst this nation's evangelical Christians. And it's those Christians, as well as the media professionals, who will benefit from The Church And The Media conference."

I asked Chris about the Christian Broadcasting Council, the organisation hosting the conference. "CBC was started in 1983. It is the Christian Broadcasting Council, a charity that's concerned about the Christian faith and its promotion through the media, whether that's Christian media or Christians working in the mainstream."

In the USA of course Christian media has long been an essential element of church life. Do we in Britain have some catching up to do? "When you study the growth of Christian media in the United States it was really birthed in the Church," responded Chris. In the 1920s the Church saw this as a great opportunity of promoting the Gospel. All they were interested in at the time was the issue of the conviction of the Holy Spirit being able to be communicated over the air. When they discovered that people were not only making a commitment to Christ but that it was building up the Church, the Church got very involved in it from different denominations. The difficulty in America is geographically it's so large, but different denominations and different preachers got involved in media and Christian media began to grow, to the point today there are over 1600 radio stations and many TV networks. The history of growth of Christian media in the UK is a completely different route. The BBC has been the domain of religious broadcasting. Now that's not even a church.

Alan Scotland

It's had an organisation it's accountable to called CRAC - Churches Religious Advisory Council which today is a multi-faith council, and therefore as evangelical Christians we have found that we have not had a voice in the mainstream because the evangelical message is a difficult message to craft. You're talking about a spiritual dimension to life -very hard to unpack.

"In the main, historically on both the American side and the UK side, it's been the liberal modernist wing of the Church that has normally engaged in media. In America, they came to a point in the '40s of self-regulation as the NCC (National Council Of Churches) began to regulate media. Even there the evangelicals began to find themselves marginalised. That's why they all came together and the NRB was formed. What we need to realise is God has got a purpose in this country for Christian broadcasting. In five years it's grown from nothing to a £20 million industry, and many of us working in the industry, and as you know Cross Rhythms started in the mainstream, have really come to the conclusion that God wants Christians in the mainstream and also God wants Christians working in Christian broadcasting. It's not 'one or the other', it's 'both'." Issues such as these will ensure a truly fascinating, and challenging, two days in September.