Your Church Sign: 1001 Attention-Getting Sayings
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About this ebook
Verlyn Verbrugge
Verlyn D. Verbrugge (PhD, University of Notre Dame) served as senior editor-at-large for biblical and theological resources at Zondervan until his death in 2015. He published a number of articles and was general editor of the acclaimed New International Dictionary of New Testament Theology, Abridged Edition. He is the author of several books, including Paul and Money and A Not-So-Silent-Night.
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Your Church Sign - Verlyn Verbrugge
Preface
The suggestion for this book came from some of my colleagues at Zondervan who have been personally challenged by many of the church sign captions they have seen. They felt strongly that there was a need for a collection of good sign captions. Since I have been changing the church sign at the Woodland Drive-In Church for the past five years and already had a list of more than a hundred captions, I volunteered to work on the book. As I began doing so, I discovered that the first hundred are the easiest to get!
This collection of more than a thousand captions would not have been possible without a lot of help from people passing on sign captions to me. When I first took on the task of changing captions on our church sign, my wife, Lori, who has always had a way with words, assisted me by writing down captions she had seen and by developing some of her own. Several people of the Woodland Drive-In Church have also been feeding me captions, especially Tom Hielkema, Shirley Van Noord, and Sue Molter. Mike Hoffman and Jonathan Petersen, fellow employees at Zondervan, have surfed the Internet and come up with a number of sayings. Helen Grasman, who works with my wife at a local quilt store, has also been keeping an eye out for messages on church signs and writing them down. And special thanks goes to Pastor Curry Pikkaart, a local pastor who has shared with me his collection of more than two hundred captions, and to Marjorie Carlisle, whose captions at the Pleasant View Church of Christ near Cassopolis, Michigan, have inspired me and who sent me about a hundred from her collection.
Finally, I want to give a word of thanks to Jim Ruark, fellow senior editor at Zondervan, who saw the vision of this book and brought it through the editorial process and various marketing meetings to its present form. And to the members of the ARMoR marketing team, also a hearty thank you for all you’ve done.
PART 1
The Concept of the Church Sign
CHAPTER 1
The Purpose of the Church Sign
For most, if not all, of the twentieth century, churches have proudly indicated who they were by the use of specially built signs, often standing a few feet in front of and off to the side of their front doors. As automobiles became more and more popular, the sign moved to a place where it would be visible to passing vehicles, even if the church itself was set much farther from the road. At the beginning, the sign was generally used to indicate the name of the church, the time of its worship services and Sunday school, and sometimes the name of its pastor. More recently, as we will see, churches have found more creative uses for their signs.
The Advertising Philosophy of Outdoor Signs
The church sign falls within the area of promotion known as outdoor advertising.¹ Included in this field of advertising are billboards, posters, and transit advertising (e.g., the signs on buses). The main goal of outdoor advertising is to reach people traveling by in their vehicles quickly with a catchy message that they will remember. The job of the billboard is to create a quick impression and to remind a viewer that a product, a service, or a nearby business exists.
²
In general, the maximum amount of time an advertiser has to communicate a message is seven seconds. But since drivers need to keep their eyes attuned to other traffic, for the majority of cars (those without passengers) the time allotted is more likely between three and five seconds. Only if traffic happens to be stalled or if a sign is visible to cars stopped at a traffic signal will a business get longer than a few seconds of examination by a potential consumer. Obviously, therefore, anything an advertiser wants to communicate has to be done with a minimum number of words. If the message can be communicated by a picture, so much the better; in advertising the adage is indeed true: A picture is worth a thousand words. If the sign is lighted, its value increases, for then advertising can occur twenty-four hours a day rather than just during the daylight hours.
Another important issue concerning the billboard is the angle at which the sign is placed to the road. In most cases, the sign should be placed at right angles to the road or perhaps at sixty degrees; this allows the maximum amount of time to digest the sign’s message. True, a sign placed parallel to a road can be read by traffic going in both