Will Shun Soliciting Money : Mainline Faiths to Start Ecumenical TV Network

America’s mainline faiths, mostly missing from television’s sweeping purview in recent years, are launching a new, unprecedented ecumenical network on the nation’s cable TV systems.

Plans for the network were confirmed in interviews this week. A partial start-up is expected in midsummer, expanding to 18 to 20 hours daily in the fall.

“A fresh, new wind is coming across the country’s television screens,” said the Rev. Daniel Paul Matthews, a Manhattan Episcopal priest and board chairman of Vision Interfaith Satellite Network (VISN).

The new network will shun soliciting money, as typifies individual television preachers. But it has the financial backing of the industry and commercial sponsorship.

Timely Idea

“It’s an idea whose time has come in market need and consumer need,” said David Ochoa, of Nashville, Tenn., a United Methodist who is president and chief executive officer of the enterprise.

“For years, the mainline denominations have been on the sidelines, but they’ve finally got off their duffs and are doing something,” he said.

Ochoa, a former Los Angeles television producer, is a part owner of Buenavision Telecommunications, which owns the cable television franchise for Boyle Heights and East Los Angeles. He also is communications chief for United Methodism’s board of higher education and ministry.

“It’s the first time mainline faith groups, Protestant, Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox and Jewish, have worked together to create a new TV programming service for people of faith nationwide,” Ochoa said.

Fallen Personalities

Religious television in recent times has been dominated by individuals, such as the fallen personalities Jim Bakker and Jimmy Swaggart, giving a limited impression of religion.

“We’ve been getting personal pietism exclusively slanted toward a narrow perspective,” Matthews said. “This is a valid piece of the pie, but it gave a distorted image of American religious life.”

Matthews, with extensive television experience in Knoxville, Tenn., and Atlanta before becoming rector of Manhattan’s Trinity Church, said the new network will reflect historic faiths that have been the “backbone of America.”

Actively involved are most major Protestant and Eastern Orthodox denominations, plus some evangelical and Jewish bodies. Roman Catholics are expected to join through decisions of bishops late this month, officials said.

Participation Sought

The officials emphasized that added participation of evangelical groups is being sought. These include the Southern Baptists, who already operate their own cable network.

Several factors have pushed mainline faiths off network television, including their aversion to soliciting money and the deregulation of broadcasting, which made public service time unnecessary and mostly unavailable.

This combination spurred individual preaching entrepreneurs to take over the field, fervently appealing for donations and raising huge amounts to buy their television time.

A catalyst for the new network was one of the largest cable systems in the country, Tele-Communications Inc. (TCI), based in Denver. It dropped Bakker’s scandal-linked network and sought a more broadly based religious component.

A key influence was research that showed that less than 10% of Americans watched the individual preaching shows, leaving untapped a large segment of religious people concerned with broader faith commitments.

Plans Snowballed

TCI executives, along with those of about 20 other cable systems, met last year with a recently organized National Interfaith Cable Coalition. Plans for the new network took life then and have snowballed since.

Officials said the cable industry is providing “bridge financing” loans to get the network started, with TCI leading the way, in costs for facilities, staffing and satellite rental--expected to be up to $5 million.

Programming is to come from the denominations, which already have many highly rated productions available but so far with little outlet for them.

“Some of the most exciting, extraordinarily good television programming simply hasn’t had broad distribution, although it has every bit of innovative broadcast quality,” said William Airy, operations consultant for the new network.

“From a programmer’s viewpoint, it’s like being turned loose in a candy store, with all the fine resources existing there, but which nobody even knows about.” Airy, of Albuquerque, N.M., formerly ran an all-music Gospel channel.

Value-Based Programming

Plans are for prime-time programs to be of a broad value-based nature that will attract commercial advertising revenue.

Nelson Price of New York, head of United Methodist communications, and board member for the new network, said 12 to 15 cable companies, in addition to TCI, were moving to help underwrite the venture.

He said programs will include examinations of social issues, dramas and entertainment that is faithful to moral and ethical precepts, interfaith films and programs for special audiences such as children, the elderly and single parents.

A standards and practice committee has set these rules for content: No material that denigrates or maligns any other faith or religion; no programs that proselytize to gain members at the expense of other churches, and no use of time to solicit funds.

Price said, “(The new network) is a historic undertaking that brings together a diverse group of religious traditions to create and sustain a positive approach to religious programming.”