Wednesday, January 14, 2009

Silly, snarky church signs






Thanks to Seth for alerting me to this fun blog Crummy Church Signs, where I can indulge in some laughable church signs across the country!

Church signs are such a haiku-like phenomenon. With little space to spare and the occasional shortage of necessary letters (3’s instead of E’s, upside-down W’s standing in for M’s), saintly messages are transformed into an awkward art that’s really just a by-product of enforced brevity.

As a kid, the church where my brother’s Boy Scout troop met usually had some great messages on their signs, like “God has a job for you—inquire within.”
What I love about the signs (other than the cutesy sayings) is the way they reflect the community and culture around them. A sign will reference technology (“Need to reboot? Remember, God saves!”) consumerism (“Walmart isn’t the only savings place”) or flash-in-the-pan slang (“Jesus is the rizzle for the sizzle.”) The perfect formula for a hilarious church sign? A combination of vaguely threatening language coupled with awkwardly misspelled words: "God hates whoremongers."

When driving my brother to Boy Scouts, I never paid much attention to the cheesy words that greeted me as I pulled into the parking lot where his friends fiddled with their pocket knives and played football before meetings. Now, I can’t help wanting to start my own collection of double-entendre-laden, snarky and silly phrases that are designed to reach out to people in a contemporary way. If only the sermons were so consistently witty…

If you're a church sign lover like me, you can also get your fix with coffee table books chock-full of church sign photos such as Donald Seitz’s “The Great American Book of Church Signs” or Steve Paulson’s “Church Signs Across America.” Buy local—ask your neighborhood bookstore for details!

3 comments:

  1. Or, you could even buy the coffee table book from the blog that you linked to ;)

    http://www.lulu.com/content/1167216

    (...except you can't buy it local...)

    Thanks for the link!!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thanks for visiting my blog.

    Here's some other blogs on christianity and pop culture
    http://stuffchristianslike.net/ A mix of serious and humorous posts on some of the silly things that happen in Christian culture

    http://iheartbibleopoly.blogspot.com -Is run by a staff member at a christian book store and features some of the more silly products her store stocks.

    http://purgatorio1.com/ a random assortment of odd christian pictures and videos. The Divine Vinyl section is particularly worth a look.

    http://larknews.com This one is a parody of things that happen in Christian culture.

    ReplyDelete
  3. http://ship-of-fools.com/foolishness/index.html is great too

    ReplyDelete