The Christian Broadcasting Council’s Revive 2026 conference, held on Friday 8th May at Premier Christian Media’s headquarters in London, drew broadcasters, journalists, musicians and ministry leaders from across the country, with speakers including Professor John Lennox and Justin Brierley. We report back on a day when speaker after speaker reached the same conclusion: the Kingdom of God is not retreating in the UK, but advancing and we as Christian media must rise to this challenge.
There was a moment during Justin Brierley’s keynote address at Revive 2026 when the whole room seemed to lean in. For 150 years, he explained, Matthew Arnold’s poem about ‘the sea of faith’ retreating with its “melancholy, long, withdrawing roar” has stood for the slow decline of Christianity in the West. But tides do something else too. They come back in.
That image ran like a current through the entire day as around 40 delegates gathered for an event aimed at reviving The Christian Broadcasting Council, now in its 40th anniversary year and challenging UK Christian media from broadcast to online outreaches.
The conference room doubled up as a studio, enabling online delegates to participate via Teams along with some of our speakers. All the sessions were auto recorded and can be watched on the CBC Your Channel, Revive 2026 Playlist.
Some of the CBC leadership team at Revive 2026: from left to right, Alistair Gibson, Luke English, Olave Snelling, Jonathan Ford and Roger Bolton. With Chris Cole joining via Teams.
CBC Managing Director, Luke English welcomed delegates, before the Chair of Trustees, Olave Snelling recalled CBC’s founding at the House of Lords in 1986 and its purpose ever since: hope instead of despair, and a strong commitment to communicating the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
Reverend Betty King prayed that the voice of Great Britain, through the media gate, would “once again be among the forerunners in this movement”. Joining by video from Stoke on Trent, Cross Rhythms’ Jonathan Bellamy described ground that feels “softer than before” after more than two decades of community radio, while CBC trustee and Co-founder of Cross Rhythms Chris Cole reminded everyone that “our identity isn’t in media, it’s in Jesus Christ”.
A returning tide
Justin Brierley has spent 20 years hosting conversations between Christians and sceptics, first on Premier’s Unbelievable? and now through his podcast and book The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God. He has watched the atmosphere change. The New Atheism that dominated the mid 2000s “dwindled and faded out almost as quickly as it had arisen”, replaced by influential secular thinkers such as Tom Holland and Jordan Peterson asking what the West loses when it loses the Christian story. He pointed to some remarkable conversions along the way, including Ayaan Hirsi Ali, once among the world’s best known atheists.
He was careful with the evidence, acknowledging that the Bible Society’s Quiet Revival report has been withdrawn over its methodology. However, the report’s withdrawal does not mean nothing is happening. Justin highlighted record numbers of adult converts in the Catholic Church in France, surging Bible sales, students saying yes to church invitations and pastors describing young men turning up at their doors all tell their own story. He also warned against allowing this new spiritual openness to be co-opted for political ends. “We have to have a message that speaks to the left and the right.”
Justin’s conclusion captured the mood of the whole conference: “People are looking again for a better story of reality, and we have the greatest story ever told. Now’s the time for us to tell it.”
Win people, not arguments
The conversation many had come for was Justin Brierley’s interview with Professor John Lennox, Emeritus Professor of Mathematics at Oxford, whose memoir My Story has just been published. Lennox recalled debating the philosopher Peter Singer in a packed Melbourne Town Hall. Rather than going on the attack, he opened by commending one of Singer’s own books. At the end, Singer shook his hand and said quietly, “I’ve never been treated like this by a Christian. Never.”
The lesson, Lennox said, is one every Christian communicator needs to hear: “Our task is not simply to win arguments. Our task is to win people.”
The professor also brought a sobering warning about deception in the age of AI. He recently discovered a deepfake website called Lennox Logic, featuring an AI generated version of himself delivering talks he had never given. It attracted 7,000 followers before being taken down, and two more sites appeared almost immediately. Jesus warned that deception would increase, Prof Lennox reminded delegates, which makes it all the more vital that Christian media becomes a trusted voice of truth. His challenge lingered long after the session ended: “We need to find bridges to listeners that attract and inform them without becoming addictive.”
See: Communicating Truth in an Age of AI and Deception – Prof John Lennox with Justin Brierley
Voices from the front line
Gareth Russell of Jersey Road presented research analysing 5,200 mainstream news stories about Christianity over a single year. A third were negative in tone, yet personal faith was the most common theme of all, helped by public figures such as Stormzy and RAYE speaking naturally about Jesus. His rallying cry was memorable: “The media are not the enemy. Wherever the UK is right now, the media are our greatest opportunity to speak to people outside the Church.”
Premier’s Kevin Bennett traced Christian broadcasting back to 1922, when John Reith heard a sermon on Ezekiel and took the helm of the fledgling BBC. The first religious broadcaster marvelled that “surely no man has ever proclaimed the gospel from such an extraordinary pulpit”. A century on, that pulpit is alive and well: radio remains a most trusted medium, reaching almost nine in ten of the UK population every week. Marcus Jones showed how Premier has grown into the UK’s Christian media mission agency, from the Journey devotional app to children sending voice notes into the After School Club. “We are here to change lives,” he said. “That’s what it’s all about.”
From the Middle East, SAT-7’s International CEO Rita El-Mounayer told of a Beirut studio that has never missed a day of broadcasting, even under airstrikes, and of an isolated believer in Tehran who wrote, “You became the church in our home and in my heart.” Her words distilled the heart of the day: “Hope is not a strategy. Hope is a person: Jesus Christ.”
Andrew Boyd of Open Doors gave voice to the more than 388 million Christians facing high levels of persecution, among them Jude, a young Nigerian who lost his wife and his entire community to militants. Asked whether he could forgive them, Jude replied, “If God can forgive, who am I?”
O’Neil Dennis celebrated a historic milestone: the UK Christian Chart is now recognised by the Official Charts Company, with gospel streaming in the UK up 119 per cent since 2020. “Creative arts are the new battleground for the minds of our people,” he declared, calling the room to move from awareness to action.
Lani Charlwood of Christians in Media echoed that call to work together, reminding delegates that we are not called to uniformity of opinion but to unity of purpose.
Broadcaster Roger Bolton turned attention to religious literacy, revealing that the BBC’s submission on Charter renewal made no mention of religion at all. CBC announced plans for a series of training videos to help journalists understand faith, and urged delegates to lobby for religious programming to keep its rightful place in public service broadcasting.
As Olave Snelling closed the day in prayer, asking that everyone would leave “with renewed zeal and renewed energy”, it was hard to escape the sense that something significant had taken place. Kevin Bennett had earlier reminded delegates that the word broadcasting is borrowed from the parable of the sower. For years, much of that seed seemed to fall on stony ground. If Revive 2026 is anything to go by, the soil is changing and the tide really is coming back in.
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