My Plea to Churches: Take Down Your Lame Signs
Every day, two freaking times a day, I have to drive by one of those church signs with the individual letters you can move around like magnet poetry to create- supposedly- witty, catchy, thought-provoking, chicken-soup-for-the-vanilla-soul kind of messages. And on swim practice days, its 4x/day.
You’ve seen the ones.
‘Christianity: Some Assembly Required’
‘Life is fragile, handle with prayer.’
‘1 Cross + 3 Nails = 4Given’
‘America bless God’
‘One in the hand is worth two in the…just kidding.
Call me cynical (if you haven’t already) but I hate these signs. I’m sure some of you love them and think I’m cold and callous, but I think they’re lame.
My problem isn’t that these don’t communicate.
My problem is that I fear they communicate very well.
They say to anyone who’s never wanted to go to church before: ‘Stay away. We’re exactly what you thought we were.’
They say:
We’re not going to challenge you.
Our religion is the sentimental kind that will have about zero application to your life.
You don’t need to be here because the paradoxical message of Christ can be summarized in this lame Christian koan.
And this isn’t just me being cranky. In the book, You Lost Me: Why Young Christians Are Leaving Church, David Kinnaman notes that one of the most frequent reasons cited by young people is their impression that the Church is shallow.
So you see churches with lame signs only appeal to people inside churches not to the people who’ll be driving past your church come Sunday morning off to some other way to spend their time. Meanwhile, your sign conforms to all the impressions out there that Church isn’t a place of depth, unexpectedness or adventure.
Thus my plea…take down your lame sign.
And then there’s this sign, which has even more depressing suggestions of lameness (I mean…how did NO ONE in that church think that might be a double entendre).
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