JOHN Lewis teaching the Church marketing values (Friday Focus, August 24)? Now I ve heard everything. That popular store provides our material needs and the Church food for our souls. That s how I always understood it to be. A serious dearth of understand

JOHN Lewis teaching the Church marketing values (Friday Focus, August 24)? Now I've heard everything.

That popular store provides our material needs and the Church food for our souls. That's how I always understood it to be.

A serious dearth of understanding the importance of spiritual ascent affects many people - including churchgoers, many of whom, members of all denominations, struggle with the idea that somehow we survive death. The message has never quite sunk home and I am not really surprised. So whose fault is that?

Nowadays too many liberal-minded individuals in religious and political circles are under the mistaken illusion that mankind alone can bring Utopia to the world. A greater force not of this world is destined to achieve that.

While we frequent this embattled world of ours we have to wage war against the forces of evil. We can all see this working against strong moral values and justice. Never has our country, or indeed the world, been in such an appalling state.

Liberal ideologies do no good in the long term. The softly softly approach ignores the necessity of discipline and opens the way for the instigators of ill intent.

The world is in effect a battle ground, a test bench, reflecting man's rebellious nature.

It all began with the 'War in Heaven', an open rebellion against God mentioned in Revelations. For their pains the participants were defeated and cast into outer darkness. The pathway of atonement is a complicated process but nevertheless real and often painful. Consequences of this rebellion, cardinal sin, overshadows us all regardless of creed and colour.

On this point hangs these questions: Who are we and why are we here? Why was it necessary for the Redemptive Act to release everyone from deserved bondage? These questions burn into the minds and souls of every logically thinking person.

The Church has been accused of being boring. It should be teaching these things on the biblical basis: There is an earthly body and there is a spiritual body. In effect we are two in one. One, the material body desperate to know more. It all links up with the cardinal sin. The rebellion is reflected in every war and evil act perpetrated on earth.

That the Church seeks to pick the brains of a major store just goes to show that it is increasingly becoming out of touch with its mission. This is surely a panic move to enhance congregations and to have the satisfaction of adding more cash to coffers depleted by an alarmingly increasing number of redundant churches.

Forget Saint John Lewis, leader in marketing innovation. What the Church desperately needs are battalions of Saint Michael's warrior angels restoring credulity and casting the forces of evil that relentlessly beset us into the void they deserve.

Whatever next? Cash tills and bonus cards at church doors?

TREVOR BEVIS, St Peter's Road, March