Exposure to the Son is good, says the sign in front of Maximo Presbyterian Church on 58th Avenue South. A few weeks earlier, it was another pun-ny phrase: God responds to Knee-Mail. A few blocks away, the Lakewood United Church of Christ’s sign warns: You cannot build a reputation on what you are going to do.
In a south St. Petersburg, Fla., neighborhood saturated with churches, one-sentence sermons are being embraced as ministry for a fast-paced world. The pithy proclamations offer a drive-by message intended to offer spiritual comfort and welcome prospective members.
Church signs and their messages are becoming big in pop culture, spawning hundreds of quote books and Web sites that allow users to create their own messages to e-mail to friends. If left unsecured, the signs are prime targets of juvenile vandalism.
While more churches today are turning to professional marketing firms to attract more members, the church sign remains the simplest and most recognizable form of spreading the Gospel.
“We want a positive message that’s kind of provocative,” said the Rev. Kim Wells, the minister at Lakewood United Church of Christ. Her favorite quote displayed on the sign along 54th Avenue South so far: Our faith is 2,000 years old; our thinking isn’t.
The 46-year-old minister said community members occasionally comment on how much they enjoy the tart testaments.
“It’s great because even though they’ve never been to our church, they still know what we’re about,” she said.
For the Fourth of July, Wells said she was thinking about telling the maintenance man to change the sign to Patriotism always, Nationalism never.
Reader boards are used most actively by Pentecostal or evangelical churches, according to Timothy Tseng, an associate professor of American religious history at the University of California at Berkeley.
Relatively new religions in the United States, these new churches had to come up with a creative approach to “gain market share” against the larger, more established entities.
“They had to resort to a lot of techniques to attract people – all this inventive craziness with music, the books they write – they’re very clever and attuned to American spirituality,” Tseng said.
But as mainline Protestant churches have struggled to keep members from drifting away, they have joined the recruiting bandwagon, straying from what Tseng described as “if-you-build-it-they-will-come mentality.”
The reader board outside Maximo Presbyterian was installed 15 years ago to reach out to the community, said Al Mason, the groundskeeper and sign tender.
Mason changes the slogan every week and said he looks for something clever that will stick in people’s minds. He gets inspiration from many places, from forwarded e-mails, to slips of paper from congregation members, to random members of the community who pull over when they see him rearranging the sign letters.
But most of the time, Mason will refer to “More Bulletin Board-Ers,” a tiny paperback book that came free with the purchase of the church sign from Signs Plus in Sarasota. The aluminum displays go for anywhere from $3,000 and $7,000, according to the company’s Web site.
Brother Lorenzo Pollard, the minister of the Bay Vista Church of Christ on 54th Avenue South, said he sticks to Scripture for his messages. The current example: Salvation is free, Romans 10: 10-13.
“Some people put something catchy that they can identify with. Something from a movie, like ‘Forrest Gump’ and ‘Life is like a box of chocolates’ paired with Scripture to show how unpredictable life is,” Pollard said. “For me, I stick with Scripture and let God’s voice speak to them.”
Plus Pollard is working with limited space. And since the church is short on help, the verse from Romans has been on display for two months.
“Changing the sign isn’t high on my to-do list right now,” he said. “Besides, it’s a good passage.”
The portable sermons fill a need as life gets faster, as people’s attention spans shrink, and as more emphasis is placed on sound bites, said the Rev. Bobby Musengwa from Maximo Church.
“There’s a cacophony of voices cramming into people’s minds today,” said Musengwa, 40. “It’s crucial to come up with a cryptic message that will stick with people for the rest of the day, or even for much longer.”
Sending a mixed message is a risk, however.
Musengwa recalled one day when the sign read Soul food served, Details inside.
A group of visitors from Brooklyn pulled into the church parking lot wondering where the food was.
“We told them we could only provide spiritual soul food,” he said. “We invited them to come back Sunday, but they didn’t come back. I guess they were really hungry.”
To err is human. To forgive is divine.
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