Church Signs Revisited

I have previously shared my thoughts about church signs—you know, the ones where you can change the letters and put up (ideally) clever or inspirational messages.

Generally speaking, I’m not a big fan of them because I tend to think they have more influence in a negative sense than a positive one. In other words, people driving by are more likely to be turned off by a hokey saying on a church sign than they are encouraged by a thoughtful one.

Sometimes, though, a church sign goes beyond being hokey or lame and actually promotes bad theology. I saw an example of that this week. A church sign in my neck of the woods is currently displaying the following message:

RELIGION: A MIRAGE
JESUS: A REALITY

This is yet another manifestation of a common theme that you hear these days, where people are desperately trying to divorce Jesus from the church, or separate being religious (which is supposedly a bad thing) from being spiritual (which is supposed to be the ideal). There was even a YouTube video on this topic that went viral a while back (see this article which has the video embedded along with an excellent response).

Here’s the key point though: the whole Religion vs. Jesus thing is a false dichotomy because you don’t have to (and in fact, can’t) choose between them. Jesus himself was very religious (and spiritual!). Furthermore, the church was purchased with his blood (Acts 20.28), so it has great, great value to him.

End of rant.

Church Signs

Of my many work-related responsibilities, one of my least favorite ones is being in charge of changing the message on the church sign we have out front. People who go to church where I do could probably guess that this is something I don’t like doing much, because it gets changed very irregularly.

It’s somewhat of a pain to drag the ladder outside, pull down the old letters, come up with something new to put up, make sure we have enough letters for the new message, pick out and arrange the new letters and put them back up on the sign (which is partially broken and therefore makes the process somewhat more difficult).

Really, though, it’s not that hard to do, and I would probably change it on a (more) regular basis if I was convicted at all that it was important—if changing the sign out front actually did any good or was worthwhile.

Instead, I tend to think that church signs do more harm than good—someone driving by is more likely to be turned off by a hokey saying than they are encouraged by a thoughtful one.

For example, one local church that I drive by regularly recently proclaimed the following message on their marquee:

PRAYING IS BETTER THAN TEXTING

While I agree with this message, I’m not really sure that I would include it in the thoughtful category.

On the other hand, maybe the person who put it up was having trouble coming up with new ideas and decided to embark on an ongoing series. If that’s the case, they may have discovered a gold mine. Just consider the possibilities:

PRAYING IS BETTER THAN FACEBOOK

PRAYING IS BETTER THAN BLOGGING

PRAYING IS BETTER THAN MYSPACE

PRAYING IS BETTER THAN TWEETING

You don’t even have to stay mired in the world of technology, because this is a very versatile theme:

PRAYING IS BETTER THAN VEGETABLES

PRAYING IS BETTER THAN TELEVISION

PRAYING IS BETTER THAN MCDONALD’S

PRAYING IS BETTER THAN READING CHURCH SIGNS

Well, you probably get the idea, and I’ve spent too much time on this anyway. There’s other stuff I need to be doing—like changing our church sign.