Resisting BS & telling a Better Story

Taken from talk given at Streatham Baptist Church 23/11/25. Full text here: A Better Story: grace & truth or watch below.

---

15 years ago I was driving in south London and as I stopped at traffic lights, my son, who was 5 at the time, said:

‘Dad, what’s a marital affair?’

I wondered what he was reading or what he had been hearing in the playground. But he was pointing to this massive billboard on the junction for a website called Marital Affair, promising ‘instant excitement’.

I couldn’t believe there was this huge advert promoting a website encouraging people to be unfaithful to their partners. When I got home, I contacted the local council and they sent me to the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) where I lodged a complaint.

And a few days later I got a reply from the ASA rejecting my complaint, saying:

“We can only act if the ad offends against widely accepted moral, social or cultural standards. This advert was unlikely to cause serious or widespread offence or be seen as irresponsible.”

Fundamentally, I strongly disagreed with this response.  I did find the billboard offensive, and I definitely thought it was irresponsible. I have seen far too often the terrible cost of unfaithfulness and the destruction it reaps.

Angered and sickened

So I started a Facebook group to see how many people agreed with me -and I quickly realised it was a lot more than I thought. Some were angered by the attack on families, others sickened by a company making money from turning unfaithfulness into a commodity.

After the first day I had over 300 people join the group and after a few days it grew to over 1500. And these people were up for up for some direct action.

Polite and reasonable

We found out that it was a big company called Global Personals behind the website and its founder and CEO was a high-profile millionaire. So we encouraged people to drop him an email explaining why they disliked the advert and emphasised the need to be polite and reasonable and not to be angry or abusive.

|The CEO didn’t like it and after a few hours he phoned us and asked us to stop the emails. We said we would, if he withdrew the advert.

Success

By this time, the campaign was getting noticed – we had coverage on Sky News, the Daily Telegraph and many other websites. Lots more people were getting involved with over 4000 now part of the group. 

So the next day, we asked our followers to phone the Global Personals offices and calmly, politely and graciously explain their experiences of unfaithfulness and their concerns about their business. They got hundreds of calls and it took just one day of that for them to issue the following statement:

“We have reviewed our advertising strategy and have instructed our agency to remove billboard ads from our current campaign in light of recent developments.”

Our campaign succeeded – and the advert was withdrawn.

Funny and tough

The campaign led to some funny things. Later, I was invited to speak at a conference in Las Vegas on ‘ethics in online dating’ – which I had to turn down as I knew nothing on the subject.

But there was also tough times, when I received a very threatening 5 page legal letter, delivered to my work and designed deliberately to intimidate and to silence us.

A small sign

And of course, this little campaign hardly changed the world – but it was a sign or a small example that people can do something to challenge wrong. A mustard seed or a trace of yeast that can work through the whole batch. As the famous quote goes:

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has”

I wanted to share that story because its was just one example of recognising and resisting the deceitful stories that we are surrounded by. Rather than a Better Story, we are often surrounded by BS – the bullshit we are fed by media and advertising.

How do we recognise and resist this BS – not with aggression or harsh judgement – but with a Better Story of grace and truth?

---

Read the full text of the talk: A Better Story: grace & truth or watch below, talk starts at 4:44: