Nearly every week I speak to someone involved in movie making. This might be a director for a TV series or a location manager for a Hollywood blockbuster. It’s one of the many wonders of working at University Church. And alongside negotiating fees for filming inside the building and from our tower, or agreeing the logistics of massive trucks parked at our gate, I get to hear some interesting details about each particular production. Last week I spoke with one of the crew from Endeavour - you’ll have seen scores of 60’s styled extras dotted around Turl Street and Radcliffe Square on Sunday – and discovered it’s a massive global hit. The series is now distributed in 57 countries throughout the world. And the audience is growing. I’m not surprised; the critics have increasingly warmed to it with every series.

What I do find intriguing, however, is that when it comes to entertainment the opinions of professional critics don’t always matter that much. In a fortnight another big A-lister movie will be filmed in and around University Church. Without mentioning the title, it’s apparently one of many franchises that are immune to negative reviews. Despite the first instalment and subsequent releases failing to charm the critics it has pulled in billions at the box office over the years. Similarly, Suicide Squad, the latest superhero romp from DC Comics has just defied a mauling by the critics by notching up £360m in its second week.

It seems the success of these films is down to both intense marketing from the studios and the growth of buzz on social media countering the critics. Tens of thousands of fans were so incensed at the negative reviews of Suicide Squad that they petitioned for the Rotten Tomatoes review site to be closed down.

The Church is an interesting parallel with all of this. We have many professional critics commenting on the decline of the church (I mentioned a recent example in in last week’s Epistle). And their reviews are getting more brutal by the year. Yet it’s difficult to find much evidence of a ‘fan base’ putting forward another point of view. There aren’t many Christians mobilising a passionate counter argument to the depressing data or professional opinions. Most just quietly turn up to church hoping things might improve.

Film fans are persuaded and energised by clever marketers at Warner Brothers even when the plot and script are bad. But who is going to persuade the Christian fan base that the Church is really worth saving and that the critics are wrong? I don’t think we can lay this responsibility any longer with church leaders (despite all their failures thus far). The necessary resources just aren’t there. We need very different, deep-pocketed people to work with them. Competition in storytelling is now ferocious (700 feature films are launched in the UK every year) and requires complex machinery and immense amounts of money to reach any scale of audience. We have to be realistic about that. The core fans of the church are still there; they just need someone to excite them again. In a rather big blockbusting way…

The Revd Alan Ramsey