I’m a person who loves the Church (obviously) and I’m also a person who loves the media. I see the media as acting like a prophetic voice in our culture; speaking truth to power, critiquing our failings, celebrating our successes and putting a mirror up to who we are. I also think it’s fair to say that the media is the most influential entity when it comes to shaping our national conversations and therefore it shapes how we understand ourselves and our place in the world.

When you consider the media and its place from those angles, both the prophetic and the sense that it significantly contributes to how we understand ourselves, it becomes easy to see how a Church minister such as me could hold the media in high esteem. Sadly though, the experience many media people have of the Christian community is a negative one.

The experience of the Christian community that many media people have comes in the form of harsh complaints, boisterous criticism, and cutting communication that would make some of our eyes water. Behind the scenes, via letters and emails, they sometimes receive harsh criticism from Christians who feel offended at particular viewpoints, positions or stories, and those responses often look vastly different from the Jesus who laid down his life for us. We may not realise it, but when we act like that, we’re hurting people…. truly hurting them even if we didn’t intend to. I guess it’s that truth that often out of our own hurt, we hurt others.

Now, some might justify that by pointing out how readily the media seems to do cutting stories about the Church and Christians, as if we’ve become an easy target. Some of that critique of the media is valid. I think for an under resourced news media dealing with a diverse community it doesn’t understand well, it can be all too easy to run stories on the stereotypical wealthy Minister or the person in a position of power in the lives of young people who has acted inappropriately in a sexual manner. These are usually true, but isolated stories. Very quickly, with only a few of those stories that don’t represent the vast majority of Christians, a public perception and conversation develops around who the Christian community is that isn’t true. Because of this, many Christians feel betrayed and bullied. I get that.

Often our response is one of defensiveness and attack; flinging scathing arrows at people in the media for various reasons. Through such engagement the tone of the relationship is set.

As someone who loves both the Christian community and the media I want to propose a different approach driven by our values of compassion, love, and respect. I want to propose an approach that has, at its heart, the desire to reflect the mind of Christ towards the news media.

I’ve deliberately chosen that phrase (‘reflect the mind of Christ’) as something that draws from Philippian 2:5. There is a humility in the picture Paul paints of Jesus in his letter to the church in Philippi that grips me. He talks of Jesus as the one who gave up the ultimate power, emptying himself, making himself nothing and taking on the nature of a servant. To see what that leads to, have a read of Philippians 2.

The picture that Paul and the gospels paint of Jesus, is a picture of one who comes fueled by love, compassion, mercy, and forgiveness. It is through weakness, service, and self-sacrifice that he offers something beautiful to the world, and ultimately, its redemption towards the good, the beautiful, and the true. When he was confrontational, it wasn’t towards those outside of the religious establishment who didn’t fit what the establishment required of people, it was towards those within the establishment who tied the whole thing up in knots and therefore kept people at a distance from God.

We follow in the footsteps of the suffering servant, the one who chose weakness to draw humanity towards its fullest expression. We follow the one who became the lamb. So my questions are, when thinking about the media, what does it look like for the Christian community to imitate his humility? What does it look like for our approach to the media to be fuelled by compassion and love, and for us to become servants? What does it look like for us to help them do what they do with no crazy imperialistic agenda? What does it look like for us to step into the lives of people who are shaping our national conversations within a highly stressful, often under-resourced environment, and to truly care for them? What does it look like for us to act, not for our benefit, but with their good in mind? What does it mean for us to look for how we can bring truth, beauty and goodness into the lives of those who work in the news media, not to somehow sway them towards our way of thinking, but simply because we have a desire for their best front and center?

In answer to those questions a few of us have created an entity called NewsLeads that has been shaped out of an idea birthed by another organisation called CBA. Currently I am now devoting two days of every working week to it.

The heart and desire of NewsLeads Charitable Trust is to serve and care for people in the news media with no hidden agenda. It simply has their well-being in mind. We will do that through the offer of a free and confidential chaplaincy/pastoral care service where news media people working in a high stress environment can offload to someone like me and know that there’s someone in the trenches with them. We’ll also help by connecting those who need good people to speak to in order to create good news content, with quality voices within the Christian community that can help.

I would love your support. I want NewsLeads to be an expression towards the news media, of the best of the Christian community. When the arrows are flying at them from some voices, supposedly justified or not, I want to be able to point to our supporters, those giving financially and those praying, to show that in the face of the attacks there are many of us attempting to reflect the selfless weakness, humility, and service of Christ. In a world of people tearing each other down, division, strife, insecurity, and anger, I believe such an approach is desperately needed.

We can’t do this without you. Check out the NewsLeads website, pray, and take the opportunity to offer your financial support as well. This can’t happen without a community of people believing in it and stepping up to help make it happen. Together, let’s demonstrate the best of who we can be.