A huge roadshow style initiative, organised by GOD DIGITAL, will take place in 2002 with major implications for both Christians and the unchurched. Tony Cummings got the facts on The Battle For Britain.

Rory & Wendy Alec

Fragmentation is everywhere in today's Church. You see it in the way churches fail to work together for the sake of the Kingdom. You see it in the way para-church organisations and local churches often gaze at each other's initiatives with indifference or even hostility. And you see it in the way in which different activities in the body of Christ - evangelism, broadcasting, worship - are often carried out in isolation to each other. This sad fragmentation is being challenged head on by a new initiative from God Digital. The initiative is called The Battle For Britain and I asked God Digital's Rory Alec to explain the vision.

"We discovered that God Channel is available to 5.5 million satellite homes every second of the day across the United Kingdom. That's almost one third of all television households that get Sky Digital. It suddenly dawned on us as we were working with the Lord that we could get the local church to help us drop leaflets into every home that has one of these mini dishes to tell them about the God Channel on channel 650. As we went into that in terms of prayer and seeking the Lord it very quickly became clear to us that the Lord would use this to bring Christian media together with the local church, us being very much as the air force and the local church as the ground force, the army."

The specially designed leaflets will be stamped with the address of the local church delivering them and pointing the recipients to the God Channel's evangelistic programming which will give them a window of opportunity to meet with Jesus in the comfort of their own homes. Rory and Wendy are adamant that this cooperative venture between media and local churches is a strategy from God. Enthused Rory, "We've been going around and appealing to churches and pastors saying, look, we're a tool, we're there already, we're inside the comfort zone, we're inside the home. People simply need to know about us and they can hear the Gospel and once having heard the Gospel, God willing the Holy Spirit convicts them and they get saved and we can refer them to your church.' So we see it as an awesome evangelistic initiative, probably one of the most profound that has ever been in this country."

Through God Digital's charitable trust, Angel Foundation, The Battle For Britain is set to officially launch this December. Having established a HQ in Birmingham, The Battle For Britain will soon start registering churches who want to participate. Its breathtakingly ambitious vision to bring the Gospel to hundreds of thousands of Britain's unchurched and, kicking off with a meeting planned in conjunction with the local churches in the Black Country, will proceed city by city, town by town, "until the Lord Jesus returns."

I asked Wendy Alec why the attention grabbing name The Battle For Britain had been chosen. "In, I think, 1936 the BBC started broadcasting from Alexandria Palace to just over 400 television sets. By the year 2001,65 years later, there are over 40 million television households. Incredible growth. With the advent of satellite and digital broadcasting more and more avenues have opened up too. But with this growth there has been an onslaught of things in the media that have torn down the moral and spiritual fabric of this nation. I do believe we have an Enemy of our souls, call him Satan, Lucifer, he is named in the Bible as being the Prince of the power of the air. I believe that one of his primary tools he has used to wrest the souls of mankind in Britain has been through electronic media
and through television especially. When you think about it, every single household that has a television has a shrine where, in one sense, people almost worship. For many people TV has almost become idolatry. I believe we have seen the spirits of Jezebel and Babylon tear down everything that the Gospel stands for. The things that are meant to be pure and righteous have been portrayed as cheap and unrighteous. The violence that comes across our screens today that really has been able to shift the minds and hearts of a whole generation.

"I believe that the battle that Christian media and the whole Church is not just for this present generation but for the generation that is to come as well. It is time God's people and all of us who are involved in media to rise up as a united front and start to take back the airwaves. Then the next decade will see a new season and Christian broadcasting will become mainstream and will become a voice to be reckoned with in this nation. Then we will truly have an influence that will impact the nation and be a force that cannot be stopped."