Thursday, April 3, 2008

Church Sign Sayings

I was looking for a saying to put on the church sign today. I dread this project because I struggle with what to put on the sign. I don't want it to be preaching or condemning. I don't want it to be some overused statement that is meaningless. I want it to be either thought provoking or informational. My heart is for the Gospel of Jesus, but there is absoulutely no way to shorten the gospel to a one sentence phrase. Here are some thoughts I stumbled across from some lady named Karen Stonecypher:

As much as I love the church, I have to admit that I really have a problem with church sign messages. In my opinion the church sign message is just a bad idea nearly any way you look at it. Most of them fall under these categories:
1. Pun
2. Platitude
3. Pop-psychology
4. Preachy and judgmental
5. Down-right damning
Some times, rarely, I’ll come across one that just has a verse on it. Those are perhaps the best ones depending on what verse is chosen (sometimes they are the worst).While a verse is nice, it is just that, one verse, lifted out of context of what is around it, out of context of the gospel and usually virtually meaningless to a non-Christian. I guess the question is, who are church sign messages for? The members? The non-Christian? I think they might tend to make the members feel self-righteous and the non-Christians to feel judged, preached at, or like they just read a cute bumper-sticker. I’ve never seen one that actually speaks to my daily life. The gospel can’t be boiled down to one sentence for a church sign. Any attempt to do so gives entirely the wrong message to people about what the gospel is. It makes the church look cute, quaint, banal, a little on the preachy side, moralistic, and entirely irrelevant to life. I think there must be a book out there called “The Big Book of Banality” from which churches choose the church sign message for the week.
What I’d like to see sometime is a church sign that says something like, “We’re volunteering at the shelter this Wednesday, show up here at 5pm to join us.” Rather than “Turn or Burn” (which I had the privilege of seeing on a Southern Baptist church sign in Little Rock, Arkansas). “Jesus Loves You” isn’t so bad. It would actually be a great message to have on a church sign except that everyone has heard it so many times it has become meaningless. I think people read it now and roll their eyes - perhaps because they haven’t seen enough evidence of that love from anywhere - especially from churches with preachy, judgmental signs.
Anyway, I think the church in America has a bad image, and in some cases for good reason. And the message we put out there for the passer-by to see every week says something about what the church thinks about people, and about what its role is to those people.
On the flip side, I do know several people personally, whom I love dearly and am good friends whith, who love these signs and who actually take the messages to heart. I would guess, however, that they are a minority. What do you think?

1 comment:

Todd Mitchell said...

I'm glad you're being thoughtful about this. Recently I alluded to the more disastrous of these signs in the June, 2008 edition of The Pastor's Quarry.