You will remember that Jesus did most of his teaching to the general public by stories. He had very important things to say yet he communicated those ideas by simple, and sometimes entertaining stories. This is just how much media communication is packaged today — and not just films or novels. As Marshall McLuhan points out:

It is misleading to suppose that there's any basic difference between education and entertainment. This distinction merely relieves people of the responsibility of looking into the matter. It's like setting up a distinction between didactic and lyrical poetry on the ground that one teaches, the other pleases. However, it has always been true that whatever pleases teaches more efficiently.

The church must be challenged to understand what it is taking in from the media. There is nothing wrong as such in watching many of the films, television plays, etc., which truthfully portray the standards of society in which we live, but which often differ from the standards that God has set us. However, if we just take on board the implication that that is the way things are, and therefore somehow they are acceptable, we are heading for a sort of spiritual and moral malnutrition.

As Paul warns us in 1 Thessalonians 5, Test everything, hold fast that which is good.
 

This does not mean I am advocating that all things are lawful, so therefore let's cast off any restraints that we have put on ourselves. But I am emphasising that we have been taking on board things which need to be handled with care, while being unaware of their powerful effects on us. Simply to preach a monastic abstention from the media is not an alternative. While we live in our mixed societies, the media are each society's form of communication. If we withdraw from communicating with that society, we invalidate ourselves as ambassadors of Christ to the world. We can't communicate with people if we don't know the way they think or if we don't understand the way they live. We must engage with the media, get into the market place of our society, to understand what those around us are really doing. We must also evaluate what we receive, weighing everything against the standards of God's Word.
 

I am always disappointed at the relative reactions to two comedy shows screened in the United Kingdom way back in the 1970s. One of them called Till Death Us Do Part was then imitated in the United States as All in the Family. It features a small, poor family presided over by the grossest bigot you can imagine. He is a racist, sexist, chauvinist, a petty nationalist, and he expresses those sorts of views with verve and crudity. I would have thought no-one watching the programme would imagine that Alf Garnett (Archie Bunker in the US version) is any kind of role model. He is an overplayed but truthful example of the ugly, unpleasant sort of character that can be found in the grassroots politics of our inner cities.

By contrast, when Till Death ... was in its heyday there was another very different kind of show on the other channel. It was called Miss Jones and Son and it was a very gentle comedy about an attractive girl who, although unmarried, had a baby boy. There was no strong language in the series, there were no heavy scenes with the boyfriend, but I feel that this was the series that Christians should have been warning against. Till Death Us Do Part was truthful. It portrayed wrong attitudes, even unpleasant attitudes, but you were in no doubt that they were wrong.  Yet this was the programme that brought vociferous condemnation from some Christians at the time.
Miss Jones and Son, however painted a dangerously irresponsible picture of a sadly very common situation. Here is an unmarried mother living alone, but there are no problems. The flat is decorated and furnished like an advertising supplement; there is no shortage of money, no problems with babysitters, no tensions with the boyfriend, no sense of insecurity, no hint of the real, honest, truthful problems which result from that lifestyle.  I don’t think I heard any Christians raising questions about this series. Christians need to engage with the media, and to evaluate the impressions conveyed, wisely and from a clear biblical position.
 

But it doesn't stop there. If we are living in our society and are in good standing with our non-Christian neighbours, they'll want to tell us what they think about the great and small issues of the day and they'll want to hear what we think. The great and small issues of the day are often those which have been raised in the media, in news or in fiction. If we are living in the market place, if we have engaged with the media and evaluated what we see every day against the authority of Scripture, we can and should express our opinions.
 

So far we have been thinking about our response as receivers of the media, as Christians whose area of influence is their family, their friends, their workmates, those within their own social milieu. I feel very strongly that the grassroots response to the media in a wise, biblically informed way - a double listening (to society and to God) - has great potential for presenting the claims of Jesus Christ to our world.

But I want to go further, to think of those who are able to contribute back to the media themselves. I say "contribute" because I find the word "use" has manipulative overtones. It implies a sort of brute force, taking the media and using it inappropriately, abusing it, for our own purposes.  In many societies - not all, I know - the door is open for us to contribute far more than we are always aware. So why do so many of us turn our faces from the opportunity? Some, I understand, look on it as enemy territory and don't want to be tainted by the world.

But some just aren't good enough to communicate professionally. I've met a number of Christians who have complained that they could not get work in the media, and implied that it was their faith that got in the way. But I would not have felt able to employ them. They were not committed to being good communicators.
There is another reason why Christians don't take up the communications opportunities that exist (and this one may be more true of certain groups rather than individuals). It is that they don't want to be constrained by the good regulation of truth and honesty that pertains on some of our public broadcasting systems. I've seen so-called Christian pro¬grammes which so distressed a sensitive friend of mine that I had to turn them off. On the surface they seemed to be everything we would want the world to know, but in reality they employed all the dishonesty we associate with second-hand car salesmen.

But I am not laying the blame for our failure to speak with a greater voice in the public media of the world, entirely on the shoulders of incompetent or intellectually dishonest Christians.

There IS some resistance to the real message of Jesus Christ from some people in authority. There always will be. But we need to persist in our commitment to communicating to the WHOLE world. Private channels are NOT an alternative. Their purposes are very different. But those who opt out of the responsibility to keep a presence in the public media are playing into the hands of many governments and authorities.
 

Os Guinness has described the approach of some governments to Christianity as "containment." In media terms, of course, nothing could suit such governments more than keeping Christians on their own stations, as long as it kept them out of the mainstream communications channels. Keep the Christians in their subculture, speaking their own language and on their own terms to their own people. But that is not enough.

A widespread, consistent, grassroots influence is vital. In an address on 2Oth September 1912 at the opening of the 101st session of Princeton Theological Seminary J. Gresham Machen said,
 

We may preach with all the fervour of a reformer, and yet succeed in winning only a straggler here or there, if we permit the whole collective thought of the nation and of the world to be controlled by ideas which, by the resistless force of logic, prevent Christianity from being regarded as anything more than a harmless delusion... So as Christians we should try to mould the thought of the world in such a way as to make the acceptance of Christianity something more than a logical absurdity.

We need Christians in all walks of life and in all strands of the media. Wholesome scripts will be a reflection of God's Kingdom, of his nature, his will. That's good in itself, and will produce an atmosphere conducive to listening. Some people cannot receive the Gospel at the moment. They have a block in their lives. We should be ready to remove that block, whatever it is - to relieve bondage, discouragement and so on - before expecting people to listen.
 

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Nick Page is a former BBC Radio2 presenter who has since worked with a number of Christian media agencies, including ICMC and currently as a Board member of Feba.
 

(Taken from Ricefields Journal Vol III No. 1)

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