Church Signs

Every church has one. And just about every church at one point or another uses it to do something morbidly embarassing. I'm talking about the church sign.

We've all read the cute sayings:

Ch--ch. What's missing? UR!

Lost? Try G.P.S. God's Plan of Salvation

Try our Sundays. They are better than Baskin-Robbins.

Groan. Why do we do this? Are "sentence sermons," passed around from one church to another, the best way to use the cheapest, most effective means of advertising we have?

And then there are the misspelled words. You'd think that a person would consult a dictionary before putting something up for all the world to see. So often, our church signs leave the community with the wrong impression. Brother Doe was assigned the job of changing it for the quarter, and because he introduced the upcoming gospel meeting as featuring a "guess speaker," the community visualizes a bunch of backward, uneducated country bumpkins.

We can do better. There are plenty of great ideas for what to put on our church signs. Why not announce the dates for Vacation Bible School or a gospel meeting? Why not highlight a brief, yet inspiring part of Scripture? The point is, the sign should leave the community thinking that inside are serious Christians whose faith is real and who are willing to reach out with Christ and provide for a community's spiritual needs.