Bishop calls on church to be 'laconic' like Jesus

The Bishop of London, the Rt Rev Richard Chartres, said in an address last week that the church should be "laconic" in communicating its message like Jesus was, rather than sounding like conversations at a university high table.

The Bishop was speaking at a forum on faith and media. In his speech the Bishop said that the internet would lead to a revolution in communications and that the church was ideally suited but ill-prepared for such a revolution, reports Church Times.

The Bishop said that a modern Jesus would not be crucified: "Instead, we would banalise him; interview him on the Today programme, give him saturation coverage; ask him to speak out until everybody was sick and tired of him and we passed on to the next sensation."

He said, however, that Jesus' communication strategy was "laconic and frequently oblique".

"He told stories which left his hearers to puzzle out a meaning," Bishop Chartres was quoted as saying by Church Times.

He said that this kind of communication was in the DNA of the church, adding, however, that the church still communicated "by producing reports whose precise level of authority is rarely clear; which read as if they were high-table conversations overhead; which treat things on the one hand and on the other at considerable length."

Bishop Chartres said that a growing conversation could continue on the web and that the web was seeing faith hold a "centrality" which has not been seen in Britain since the 19th century. He said that when the church makes formal pronouncements it needed to take "a rather different style, and one not so different from the communications of Jesus himself".

The Bishop also said that the church should not allow itself to be tempted into trying to "merchandise God", describing faith as "subversive". He also said that there existed a new generation of journalists ready for a new engagement with faith.

He challenged the church saying, "Will they find people of faith to meet them intelligently halfway?"