Beware what you say to a journalist! Yesterday I was quoted in an article in The Daily Telegraph about a retired minister in Cheadle, Staffs, who is setting up an alternative gathering in a disused chapel aimed at reaching people who find traditional church boring or irrelevant. It will be café-style with video films and coffee and toast. On the back of that short piece I was invited to do a live interview on a new digital talk radio station called Colourful Radio about how the Church of England is finding new ways to present the Christian message to unchurched young people. What I thought would be the usual 5 minute slot turned out to be a whole half hour with lots of opportunity to put the gospel across. One downside was having to talk to a rather crackpot listener who came online and wanted me to condemn the Talmud for promoting crimes against children! The other downside is of course that hardly anyone might have been listening – it is hard to know with a new digital channel how many listeners it really has.
When I came back into my office the first call was from a Polish journalist wanting to interview me for the Polish edition of the German paper Die Welt on the same Cheadle story! Working with the media is so unpredictable – you struggle to get them to be interested in what you think is a really good story, and then something that you think is just a page filler really takes off.
Imagine if that caller about the Talmud had claimed it was a commandment from God that 'Anyone who curses his father or mother must be put to death.'
You could simply have pointed him to Matthew 15 and would his face have been red!
Posted by: Steven Carr | 08/31/2006 at 08:31 PM