To facilitate a truly global conversation, we ask Christian leaders from around the world to respond to the Global Conversation’s lead articles. These points of view do not necessarily represent the Lausanne Movement. They are designed to stimulate discussion from all points of the compass and from different segments of the Christian community. Please add your perspective by posting a comment so that we can learn and grow together in the unity of the Spirit.

A response to:

Media and the Gospel: Moving Forward Together – Lars Dahle

 

Lars, Many thanks for this overview.

I want to pick up on two of your questions:

How can we as Christians be present and visible with truth and love in the major news and entertainment media?

And

How to equip young Christians globally to become media missionaries and media professionals?

I have spent the past 30+yrs wrestling with these two issues.

For most of these years I was on full-time BBC staff, where I never really knew what my colleagues made of my Christian faith (which I did not hide, but didn’t talk about all the time – hoping ‘being present with truth and love’ in the studio and Newsroom was sufficient). It was a truly humbling moment on my last day recently when my boss emailed this to my entire (global) department: “Julia has really brought home to me some of the core principles of the BBC – impartiality, fairness, commitment to truth, and a commitment to hearing all sides of a story. She embodies this in all her work, not just her journalism work – so that all her colleagues I think have learned how to embody these principles in all their day to day development work as well as our broadcasting side’.

Had I embodied the Gospel? My boss didn’t mention my faith, though she clearly knew it was there. Could/should I have done more? I remember telling the very top boss at a Christmas carol service that we in the Christian Union regularly prayed for him (it was a time he was having to make savage cuts, cutting hundreds of jobs). He looked genuinely moved, and, I felt, almost teared up.  

But I was able to speak that word of encouragement only because I was ‘there’: I had earnt the right to speak, not this time ‘truth to power’ but ‘love in the major news media’. Would there were many more of me. Which brings me to the second question.

This is the one on which I have spent months, even years of my ‘spare’ time, but which still puzzles me. The wider Church just still does not seem to ‘get’ the fact that equipping young Christians to become media professionals is of crucial importance. Recently in London, one of a handful of global media hubs, a network of hundreds of Christian media workers has not been able to long-term fund a part-time Development co-ordinator, with the role (and the time) to meet members individually: to encourage them, to be a friendly shoulder to cry on and so on. This despite it being a network supported by the UK’s major church denominations. So the excellent Christian we had (who had previously lost her BBC job, again due to savings cuts was forced to go, leaving our 800+ media network bereft of a dedicated worker.

….And this was not the first time I’d experienced this lack of vision in the wider church.

Unless the Church is interconnected with Christians at the ‘coalface’ of daily and weekly journalism, programme-making etc, it will never be able to understand and grasp the opportunities which present every hour as those who shape media and broadcast agendas search restlessly and relentlessly for contributors to comment on, and progress debate on, topics of the day. 

As young people increasingly lack any kind of exposure to church life, or the Christian worldview at the base of so much of our civilization, those in media careers will not even know there are alternative beliefs and viewpoints to their own, nor will they know where to turn to find them.  

In such an environment, only extreme and unrepresentative views will get heard above the ‘noise’.

I remember about 10yrs ago, that I, along with many other BBC journalists and programme-makers were invited by our News management to an intensive day’s seminar about Islam and how we needed to learn to better report about it. This was the result of lobbying by UK Islamic groups who were upset that we were quoting individuals who, they said, did not speak for the vast majority of UK Moslems. Since then, there have been big changes, with I believe, more informed understanding.   

The day may not be too far off when I can see Christians feeling the need for the same kind of seminar. And it won’t be all the media’s fault.