The word and the tag. Graffiti and the Good Book. An unlikely mix? Right?

Well, if that's your considered view, take a trip tomorrow to Church House, the organisational HQ of the Church of England, and amid a plethora of youth activities including video diaries, puppet theatres, and skater theatres, you’ll see a handful of teenage believers attacking large canvasses with chunky marker pens. Their aim? To create a graffiti which, in the words of the organisers, " reflects their vision of the Church of the future."

The four canvasses – each a metre in size – will eventually grace the 12th century walls of Lambeth Palace. Graffiti - whose political value has been emphasised by artists such as Banksy - has certainly come a long way since the unsightly scrawls which mar urban buildings and subways. But surely the Church isn't endorsing vandalism?

"Graffiti isn't a crime if it's done with permission," qualifies Canon Paul Bayes, the Church of England's adviser on Mission and Evangelism. He adds: "The best graffiti-style art is fluid, intelligent, streetwise, direct communication. And Christian graffiti artists ‘spray the gospel’ with permission in a way that many young people can immediately understand. They contribute to the task of sharing the Gospel with every part of our culture."

Increasingly, mainstream Church workers embrace graffiti as means to engage with anti-social, disengaged youth. There even exist Christian graffiti crews, such as the ESC East London/Essex collective, linked to the Re:generation Church in Gidea Park, Essex, who use graffiti as a way of getting a Christian message of love, forgiveness and redemption, to non-Churched youth.

Graffiti is also part of Fresh Expressions, an Anglican-Methodist drive to bring Christianity back into secular, contemporary culture , explains Dr Rachel Jordan, the organiser of tomorrow's youth forum event. "Fresh Expressions is about trying to embrace other cultures, including youth culture," she says: "What the Church has done in the past has been very English and very middle class. Graffiti is a medium young people can use to express themselves."

Sarah Hicks, the artist supervising tomorrow’s graffiti bonanza, says the medium “attracts the naughty kids, the ones that hang out and get involved in drink and drugs. It’s not seen as an art form but at the end of the day it is.”

Hicks, a life-long Christian, speaks from experience. For the past year, she has worked with a local graffiti artist and between 20 to 30 10 – 16 year olds on a lottery-funded project to create graffiti artwork in a skate park in Longridge near Preston.

At first, Hicks admits, the kids were “a nightmare” who spent their first session “lobbing things across the room.” But it was obvious they also suffered low self-esteem: "They arrived fed up, saying things such as "I'm rubbish, I can't draw a circle."

Gradually Hicks helped them create vast panels with images including giant monkeys or pandas with punk hairstyles. By the end of the project each had acquired a qualification in graffiti design. "As a group they had bonded and grown in confidence and were starting to take pride in their space and area," she reports.

Now the group are monitoring the panels, and a credit system may be introduced to reward those who wish to remove negative abusive graffiti scrawled on top of their designs. The scheme also provided a chance for the organisers to explain what the law was concerning graffiti and vandalism:"something many of the kids had never heard before," says Hicks.

It also showed that graffiti can act as an “ice-breaker” , a way into discussing other issues – including bullying and anti-social behaviour.