MORE RUBBISH ON TELEVISION

“I don’t get out to church much – it’s my age you know – but I always watch Songs of Praise on Sunday nights”

I do not know how many times I have heard that from people who describe themselves as “church members”. Even the bit about age is consistent. I think of several people who first offered that excuse 20 years ago, which means that they were then the age I am now, and they thought then it was no age to be going out to church on a Sunday evening – if you follow me.

I need to explain.

Songs of Praise is one of the BBC’s great success stories. Its format is utterly predictable. TV cameras descend on a church which is highly telegenic. (This being television, “church” must be understood as a building.) Occasionally the gathering place will be plain but that case there will be large numbers of people (telegenic people of course) – say, at a convention. Behind the scenes the people of Little Cupcake on the Wolds will have been drilled by local musicians so that they can sing a dozen well-known hymns with great gusto. Sundry choirs will have been imported for the day. The TV company arrives and a recording is made. Many years ago when I was green and in my salad days I attended just such a recording. It was about as much like a church service as the New York Marathon is like a jog round the park. The programme has not really changed over decades and the show goes on and on and on. There will be the interview with the local hero, the biography of the person with a disability who has triumphed through their faith, the old dear who will say how nice the community is and a couple of other human interest inserts.

This is just about all the religious broadcasting we in the UK get. You will search our airwaves in vain for a “normal” or even “abnormal” service. Apart from some obscure cable or satellite channels hidden in the dark recesses of the ether we do not have religious broadcasting. On my first visit to the USA I was amazed at the endless selection of services I could spectate on my friend’s 140 channel TV set. Flamboyant African-American clergymen in dramatic costumes; impassioned second division televangelists screaming abuse at the devil; people falling over; priests incanting in foreign languages; the list goes on and on.

I hate them all.

Perhaps I should not use that word. But they do rouse passions in me. Why?

They appeal to the spirit of inertia that lies dormant in most of us. Why should a body make its way to church if it can be watched at home? This is bad for the church and it is bad for the professing believer. It is bad for the church because (reduction ad absurdum) if everyone did it there would be no church, and the TV company would have to fill 40 minutes on a Sunday evening with something else. It is bad for the believer because spectating religion is just that – a spectator sport. If you can drink coffee and polish your shoes whilst watching Songs of Praise you are not engaging with God with your heart and soul and strength and mind and you will not know what blessing is.

Such programmes create a completely false impression of church. They represent church as a polished musical performance, a canon of about 15 hymns, and a crowd of happy smiling people. If the viewer comes to a real church they find a rough edges to the music, some distinctly non-telegenic people, and a whole load of stuff that is boring (the secretary giving some notices), arcane (the way the offering is taken), and mentally demanding (a sermon).

A friend of mine believes the remedy is to broadcast “ordinary” services. To describe any service as ordinary is to my mind an own goal – but let that pass. I disagree with him because it would still be spectator sport and worship of God can only be participatory. Without participation it is empty. I also agree with the TV producers – it is not good broadcasting material. At least Songs of Praise is well done and if God must be put on the box the programme should be good quality.

In an age where the slick and professional is lauded indiscriminately I want to tell it from the housetops: get yourself into a real church. There may only be 72 people in the building; the pastor might not be a brilliant preacher (or equally he might be excellent but have just spent a night with a couple whose infant child died); the congregation may have all the same wrinkles and flaws that you do but something wonderful can happen – if you are open to it. You can encounter God. How do I know? Because Jesus promised.

One Sunday, many years ago, I sat in a little Baptist Church. The service was exactly as it always was. The congregation was as they always were. Next to me was a student friend: an Anglican I had persuaded to come to the Baptists because they don’t eat their young and are not really a sect, honest. Hugh, the preacher, was brilliant. Well normally he was brilliant but this Sunday he was awful. If this had been TV religion he would have been severely edited. I winced and fidgeted my way through 65 minutes of anguish. The hymns went wrong; it was a deputy organist at the ivories and as an organist she made a assistant steward. Hugh spoke for several decades and I couldn’t make head or tail of his ramblings. Towards the end I turned to Christ who was in tears. Being the spiritually sensitive soul I am I asked if he was ill. “Leave me alone” he sobbed. As the congregation filtered out a few concerned people asked if he was OK and I made reassuring noises. You have got there much quicker than I did that night. Chris – high church, stuffed-shirt, aloof Chris had been converted. Surely God was in this place and I did not know it.

That is the point: God is in these places – the old cold stone buildings, and the rickety clap-board huts, and the old halls with their defective and unprofessional worshippers. And God is saving a people for himself and none of it is on TV.

Away with TV religion! God is where his people meet. Hallelujah!