David Hogg and Chris Benfield
Up until the PR people got there, St Mary Magdalene at Lundwood, South Yorkshire, was a typical last outpost of the Church of England on the frontier of Godlessness – struggling to keep a regular congregation of about five.
Then it became Church Lite and was reborn and now more lost congregations look likely to find themselves being wooed back into the pews with snappy slogans and giveaways as the promotional formula tried and tested in Lundwood is taken up by churches elsewhere.
The story of how an American priest and a marketing company brought God back into Lundwood, a former pit village on the Pontefract road out of Barnsley, is being told in a three-part TV series called Priest Idol, which starts on Channel 4 today at 8pm .
The hero is undoubtedly James McCaskill, who came from Pittsburgh, USA, to fill a vacancy at St Mary's last December and has worked tirelessly to restore a sense of community to the parish.
But the documentary also reveals the help he got from a Leeds-based advertising and marketing company, The Propaganda Agency, which is more used to promoting hair products and ice-cream.
Channel 4 sent a film crew to follow Mr McCaskill's struggle and persuaded Propaganda to give its services for free.
The company sent in creative director Steve Dixon, 44, who was brought up Roman Catholic in Bolton, Lancashire, and says he is now "an optimistic agnostic".
As a team, Mr Dixon and Mr McCaskill have learned to walk a fine line between modernising the church's outlook to attract younger worshippers while not alienating traditional church goers.
"It was the marketing brief from Hell," Mr Dixon said.
"Lundwood used to have four churches but St Mary Magdalene's is God's last stand there. It is a typical former mining community with a drugs problem, an unemployment problem and anti-social behaviour.
"People said the church was stuffy, dark, patronising, run by crusties and irrelevant to them.
"We helped the church council to come up with some changes and then we had to find a way of telling people about them.
"We came up with the idea of Church Lite and slogans like '50 per cent Less Stuffy', 'More Conversation Than Conversion' and 'More Doing Good Than Do-Gooders'. And we gave away light bulbs and a water spray we called a Calming Spritz, with messages about how the church could do the same job.
"In the end, all we could do was get people to the door. It needed somebody like Father James to keep them. And now he has a regular congregation of more than 50 – or an improvement of 900 per cent as we marketing men like to put it."
Propaganda called in a comedian to give Mr McCaskill some tips on holding an audience and sales consultancy Huthwaite International, from Wentworth, near Rotherham, coached the church elders in how to talk to strangers at a garden party. They were advised, for example, to say "when you have problems" instead of using the old phrase "times of trouble".
Mr McCaskill was astonished by the scale of the PR project.
"We thought that they would come up with a letterhead or something, not realising it would be a campaign to promote the whole church," he said.
"It was about livening things up. The Church of England can be a stuffy institution. But, at the same time, we were not interested in dumbing things down. I am not in the entertainment business."
Steve Dixon agrees: "We wanted to keep the myth and the sanctity, not turn the church into a café. The world is full of activities pitched at being a 'third space', between work and home. We just wanted to point out that the church was already delivering to that need.
"It might all sound very modern and capitalist, but I think we were only following the advice which Jesus and St Peter gave 2,000 years ago about speaking to people in terms they understand. I don't know what the Church of England is doing about it but I do think Lundwood was a micro-example of what is a macro-problem for them."
But a Church of England media office spokesman said: "We don't think we need a marketing company. Without wishing to under-value the contribution Propaganda made to this excellent programme, many of the ideas they contributed are already in the advice which enabled half our parishes to grow their number of worshippers last year."
chris.benfield@ypn.co.uk