House to Home, Woman & Home, Ideal Home, Livingetc, Homes and Gardens, Good Housekeeping, Nuts. Ok, not Nuts. But all the rest are magazines currently on sale in the UK published to help us turn the houses we live in into the perfect home of our dreams. And the homes featured in their pages are perfect in every way. All the colours match – from soft furnishings to wall paper. All the fires are real. All the bedrooms are tidy. And above all there’s always the smell of freshly baked bread in the kitchen.

Isn’t this the perfection you have in mind for your home? Well maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. The older I get, the less I care about the house being clean and tidy at all times. But the truth is we all have some sense of a perfect home deep within us somewhere – and it seems that these lifestyle mags are able to tap into that longing in our soul. It’s possible that for some the home of their childhood was perfect in every way and they have no need to try and create that perfection today but for most, to some degree or other, imperfection ruled and the worse the situation the more the longing for perfection now.

And so people spend time, effort and a lot of cash trying to create what they never had – a safe, loving, accepted-as-you-are idyll. It’s never achieved of course because the change needed is not in the house but in the heart. But in tapping into a cry in the land and in selling the dream the publishers manage to sell a lot of magazines.

What could the church do to tap into the same longing?