St Luke's Church Eccleshill - Articles from "The Link"

The Good News in the News

The Holy Spirit
refreshes the parts other
spirits cannot reach.

"I keep seeing you in the paper", said a lady attending a funeral in church recently. As always I'm glad to get the church into the news. There we were again, in the T&A on 18th August and 3rd September. This time I confess to feeling a bit of a fraud: if anyone deserves the credit it's Rev Stephen Treasure, who did a lot more posters on our church notice board than I've ever done!

The story was that a national Christian magazine had commissioned two advertising agencies to suggest some ways to "sell" the church in the modern day. Both of them did some hard looking at what church had to offer, and came up with some slogans which we ought to pay attention to.

Jesus
gives life wi'
nowt taken out.

Link ICA chose 'Get a life - Go to church' as their strap line. "Most people come to a point in their lives when, although they may have a nice car, home, and partner - they feel something is missing. There is a lack of meaning and direction in their life - a hole. Everything else in their life may be sorted, then comes the realisation that your soul isn't." We should go for a 'medicine for your soul' message.

Who?
Who really has His
finger on the pulse
of West Yorkshire?

So the T&A rang us up - "I saw this and I thought of you" said the lady (oh dear - another quote). "Yes, we've been doing it for years," I replied, and went on to tell her about Stephen's famous "British Gas" poster.

Behind all this hilarity is a serious point. I think it was well expressed in a letter in the Otley Target: "Having read reports of the Eccleshill vicar who uses adverts to tempt people to his church, I am both amused and sad. It's a poor reflection on the times we live in that the church has to resort to such strange methods - but it's a splendid idea nonetheless. After all the Bible is the biggest advert of the lot!"

John Hartley