Body Language: walking the walk

Body Language is a campaign that plans to get faith back onto the everyday conversational agenda, by resonating with people outside the church and connecting with the people inside it.

The project has the ambitious, but achieveable target of a national advertising campaign that aims to get ‘it' (faith) to come up more often in conversation. How? By creating greater awareness of the church’s ‘Community Care’, particularly at the local level, in a manner that actively invites non-Christians to find out more and even contribute to church-based social care programmes. Why? The research the idea is based on showed that this was the common ground most likely to be productive in getting both those inside, and outside the churches talking and working together.

I've had several meetings with the team from LICC behind the initiative and I am very excited about it. And I'm not easily excited. Watch this space for more, in due course. In the meantime, I highly recommend the following reading, available from LICC online:

Freely you have received...

This morning I was at the local train station with two dozen others from the local churches. We were handing out free hot cross buns to commuters with details of local Easter services and, of course, contact details for the Christian Enquiry Agency.

It was a heart warming experience, for the simple reason that people were much nicer than I expected them to be! There were one or two very sceptical people that barely made eye contact if at all, but the vast majority of people were pleasantly surprised and more than happy to fill the time waiting for the train by munching away on a hot buttered bun. If nothing else this is a simply great way to raise the profile of the churches in the community. And judging by previous years, this activity repeated nationwide, will result in an influx of enquiries about the meaning of Easter.