Stupid Church Signs

Most signs outside a church aggravate me.  They really get on my nerves.  Maybe they shouldn’t but they really do.  Signs that say “CH _ _ CH What’s missing U R” or “We will love the hell out of you” or my personal bane “Sign broken message inside.”  Don’t even get me started on “Christian” billboards that say “Where will you spend eternity? Smoking or non-Smoking?”  or “Eternity is forever.” these always seem to be followed by a random Old Testament Bible Verse.

However, I did find one church sign that was not offensive.

The reason I find most of these signs so offensive is that for churches it assumes that this church is the only building with a valid message.  It assumes that this church is the only welcoming church and all other churches are false.  It is a marketplace theology that decides the church must have more customers to be successful or else they are a failure as a church.  This turns people into customers who need a product instead of people who need a savior.  This is a grievous tragedy.

Jesus never used catchy saying to gather a bigger piece of the market share.  In fact when the crowd got bigger he would say words the crowd didn’t like and were hard so that people left.  Jesus preferred small crowds.  He had 12 disciples that he spent years with and even that was to big because one of them still betrayed him when it mattered most.

So then, what is a proper use of a church sign? To convey information about services? To Tell people Jesus loves them? Those sound like much better reasons than to tell people they will be spending eternity in hell because they didn’t breast feed their adopted children (no joke, I saw that on a billboard in South-Central Pennsylvania).

Once again, maybe I’m wrong and maybe signs should be used for cornering their place in the theological marketplace and spreading hate filled messages?