The Jesus Newsroom

I’ve been referencing The Newsroom a lot lately; partly because it’s such a good show, partly because I want to be MacKenzie McHale, partly because I already feel a lot like MacKenzie McHale, and partly because, there are so many parallels between the show and Church life today.

In some ways, many of us who are actively involved in the Church today, leading various ministries, might be on a kind of ‘mission to civilise’, like MacKenzie and Wil in the Newsroom. Or if not exactly to civilise, we are on a mission to do God’s mission and we want to get it right. We naturally want to see the Church be effective at what it’s called to do.

If you are under 50, you have no living memory of a time when the Church was the hub of society and had a high credibility rating … but there are people in the pew next to you who do have such memories … and, like me, you might feel sad for them, because they watched it disintegrate rapidly, and you wish you could turn back time and make everything ok like the way it was in 1920, but you can’t … and if you’re honest, part of you is glad you can’t … because you don’t really want things to go back to the way they were in 1920.

Anyway, the point is. we’re a bit like the Newsroom: a fabulous team of people with a vision to get it right. But of course, there will never be a perfect church that gets everything right, and that’s what the less green, older clergy know too well: that God is faithful, even when we aren’t always, and that you can’t make radical change happen just by sheer youthful determination and hard work, because you’re not God. God is God, and God has a habit of letting His people make mistakes, even big ones.

Season 2 of the Newsroom is all about what happens when the team make a massive mistake; one that has the capacity to undo the entire operation. It’s a mistake that was mostly the fault of one bad guy, plus a couple of other bad guys, as well as there being contributory negligence on the part of the whole team … sounds familiar to me. A lot of the mistakes the Church has made, could be pinned on some ‘bad guys’, but there’s a corporate share of responsibility too. There were things we overlooked, corners we cut, blind-eyes we turned and also, from time to time, we forgot what we were on about. We sold out. We became lukewarm.

We lost the trust of the public.

There’s a fabulous scene in Season 2 of the Newsroom, when Charlie suddenly and drunkenly shouts: “Leona, we don’t have the trust of the public anymore!” That’s a heartache that every evangelist knows too well. It's the heart of a person who wants to share good news, but the Jesus Newsroom doesn’t have the ratings it once did. We are painfully aware that we don’t have the trust of the public anymore.

And yet, God knows what He’s doing.

And He doesn’t need a lawyer.

I’m still choosing to work for the Jesus Newsroom, despite our failings, because I still believe we’re the best news program in town. It’s not because I worship the newsroom itself, or because I think I can be its saviour, but because the news is still good and because I believe God asked me to be part of the team.

Oh and by the way, we are sorry, for everything we’ve done wrong. We’re deeply sorry for the things we missed and the things we refused to see. We retract everything we said that wasn’t true.

And we’ll be back with the news, after this short break …