A local church in my area erected a sign board earlier this year. It’s a massive sign board with plenty of room for very-large print messages to reach a very large population (the church is located on a very busy intersection).
The message on the board is changed once a week, and since I usually venture past this intersection once a week I get to read their little messages. However, and with much love and respect, and I can’t help but feel a little critical of some of the messages which have been put up. Some weeks they have been excellent. Attention grabbing, to the point and thoughtful. Other weeks and it feels as though the message is so general as to lose its Christian integrity (by which I mean that the message loses any Christian distinctiveness).
Now, I have been verbally thinking through this issue and Shte1 gave me a challenge – it’s difficult to come up with an interesting message which grabs your attention and is gospel centred, so I should try coming up with one per week for a year and see how I go.
Ok.
Here, I hope, is the criteria by which I hope any message should be judged upon:
- The message should be short – a sentence of approximately 10 words
- The message should be punchy and attention grabbing
- The message should be thoughtful and distinctively Christian
Of course the primary motivation of any message board is to attract people into your church building, so hopefully the messages should do that also.
Now, given that criteria, I’d like to suggest my first post – a spin on the one I saw up a few weeks ago, “At the heart of all conflict is a selfish heart.”
Now, this isn’t too bad. However I didn’t believe it to be true – particularly when you consider some of the big divisions which are happening in churches across the world (ie in the Anglican and Presbyterian churches across the globe regarding liberalism and the acceptance of homosexuality). There is certainly conflict in these disputes – but are these conflicts rooted in selfish hearts? Rather the issues were are being disputed are matters of biblical doctrine, and when it comes to matters of biblical doctrine there are lots of gray areas, but there is also black and white. I believe that the conflict in the global Anglican communion is not rooted in selfish hearts, but in sinful ones.
So I’d twist the previous message shown to this one, “At the heart of all conflict is a sinful heart.”
That’s church sign board message #1 down. 51 to go!
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