**If you missed our lively discussion on scripture, make sure to visit the comments from the last post. And just like my last post was NOT about getting people to tote their Bibles to church, this one is NOT about getting Christians to remove their bumper stickers. It’s about a much harder task; loving people.**

To be honest, I didn’t come up with this catchy phrase, though I wish I had. John Fischer recently captured many of my thoughts on what ails us evangelicals (and has been saying what needs to be said for many, many decades before his recent thoughts on bumper stickers at www.fischtank.com)

I love my small town and most of what comes along with it (cue John Cougar Mellencamp). But my quaint southern village is much like many others in the south (of which I am a proud resident). It is filled with religion, and this is not necessarily negative. But when those of us “on this inside” attempt to encapsulate the deep and historical elements of our Christian convictions on a church sign or a bumper sticker, our “religiosity” becomes an inside joke that no one gets but us. It ends up defeating the purpose by minimizing the gospel to a slogan and marginalizing the community of Chist as a bunch of sarcastic jerks who only care about getting to heaven because we “got a mansion in glory.”

Illustration, you ask? Certainly. One popular bumper sticker that has stood the test of time (I saw my first one back in the mid 1980’s) states, “In case of rapture, this care will be unmanned.”

Wow. Let’s unpack this a little bit. First, how many lost people know what “the rapture” is? (They would not be able to even find the word “rapture” in their Bible, by the way). And how many normal folks would read that and be drawn to the gospel by it’s clever quip about an eschatological event? And worst of all, will the average guy or gal feel like there is a cheekiness to our faith that we need to broadcast on the rear end of our car?

Or consider this one, commonly seen on church signs in the Bible belt. “Stop, Drop, and Roll won’t work in hell.”

Oh, bless my soul. Technically, I guess this statement is correct, but why would a church put that on their sign? Will this really endear anyone to Jesus? The sign is there, evidently, to communicate who that church is, what they believe, and what events are happening in that community. So why put something on a sign so smug, hateful, and mean-spirited? If that slogan is aimed at non-believers to get them to think about eternity, then it ain’t working. All it does is make them think we’re religious rednecks. If it is aimed at Christians (which is actually my theory) then it makes us feel more superior to those who will one day, apparently, wind up in hell, the very people we are supposed to care about and love. See the logic? The sign does not communicate the love of Christ. The messages we convey oftentimes communicate a spiritual smugness, a theological superiority, an insider mentality where we get the joke and they don’t.

So when a lost person reads our clever bumper stickers, maybe we should ask ourselves if they will understand. Is that church sign for them, or us? And is the slogan a cheap replacement for the more difficult task of loving them to Christ?

If they miss our miss-guided point, then the joke is on us. And it’s not funny. God, save us from the PLAGUE of thinking we can sum up something as big as your Gospel on a bumber sticker.

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 5th, 2008 at 2:25 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.