One of my worst passions is irritation and one of my worst irritations is church billboard slogans. I don’t know why these things bother me so much, but they do.
Between the Piggly Wiggly grocery store on the Maybank Highway, some ten miles north of here, and the Rockville, S.C., “yacht club” the same distance south, there are about twenty-five churches. Most, I suspect, have been incorporated to avoid land taxes; you almost never see a car parked out front, not even on Sunday mornings. Some of them, though, are thriving congregations whose parking lots are crammed full half the nights of the week (if only they were Orthodox…). Driving past, it’s all but impossible not to read the inspirational inscriptions posted on their display boards. And they’re not alone. There are other examples of this kind of ecclesial infomercial scattered all up and down the Maybank, from Folly Road just south of Charleston to the end of Bear’s Bluff on Wadmalaw Island. Here are just a few, selected at random.
The Book of Acts church, just a stone’s throw from the local True Value Hardware, recently attempted to lure passing motorists with this startling example of Johannine exegesis: “Jesus is the Bread of Life. Come on in and have a slice!”
An explicitly “Southern” Methodist Church a little farther on offers a rather in-your-face bit of advice as gnats and July weather advance on the lowcountry: “Don’t like the heat? Prepare to avoid it!” It’s pretty clear they’re not talking about summer escapes to the Blue Ridge Mountains.
An AME church on Bear’s Bluff Road assures us that “God answers knee-mail!” And some congregation I can’t quite recall lowered the bar with this non-sequitur: “Suffering from truth decay? Brush up on your Bible!”
It took a minute of soulful reflection to get the point of this one, but the paschal consolation was worth it: “Body piercing saved our life!”
Maybe the worst, from a strictly theological point of view, was posted on a large panel in front of a very large parish building, located on the north end of the Maybank beyond the Wappoo Cut, where nobody who lives on the barrier islands could miss it. I’d seen it in a few places before, but the absurdity—and tragedy—of its message hit me especially hard as I was coming home one night after giving a talk on the Holy Trinity. The message was a threat, couched in attempted humor: “‘Don’t make me come down there!’—God.”
It’s not only the Islamists and assorted Unitarians who make me wonder if we all “worship the same God.” It’s also my neighbors who put up with a pastor that would post that kind of thing outside his church.
I was tempted to duct-tape a piece of cardboard to the base of the panel, offering the corrective: “I did come down there, but there was nobody home!” This was to be a cleverly veiled allusion to the prologue of St John’s Gospel. Fortunately, better sense led me to keep my nonsense to myself and drive on (leaving an Orthodox response to our priest, who handled it very well).
Instead of bromides and heresies, why can’t some of these “Bible churches” post words from their more splendid hymns? Something along the lines of “The heavens are telling the glory of God,” or even “Just as I am, without one plea, O Lamb of God, I come to Thee!”
I really don’t much like church billboard slogans. But every once in a while something appears on one of those ubiquitous display panels that puts me to shame and teaches me not to judge. Especially not to judge my Christian brother.
Remember the Book of Acts church and its invitation to take a slice of the Bread of Life? It’s located in an area that’s still scarred by a lot of rural poverty. Last time I passed that church the message had changed, even though the idea behind it hadn’t. In place of the cute bit of Johannine exegesis, it said simply: “Free summer lunch, 12:00 noon.”