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Evangelising the Kings way
Published originally in the February issue of The Treasury.
Think of your church building. Does it have a notice board? What message does it contain? With what does it compete?
Perhaps yours is a rural church with only a few houses around it; maybe its in a housing estate with only a pub and a newsagent to add colour to the rows of identical terraces.
Mount Pleasant is not like that. It’s a big baptist church that sits on The Kingsway, a busy shopping street in Swansea. Thousands of cars, vans and buses drive past it every day; hundreds more pedestrians dart and weave across the road in front of it. For that reason the church have put up two big billboards that serve as wayside pulpits.
Both are plain. There are no pictures and no clever wordplay (you won’t see a picture of an ice cream with the pun “Don’t miss our Sundae’s” here). They are bright to the point of garish, have no awareness of fashionable typefaces (Arial- ugh- is the font of choice) and for the sake of those speeding motorists, the phrases are snappy. Currently the message is JESUS IS LORD on one and HE IS RISEN on the other.
Next door to the church s a beauty salon called the Blue Lagoon. On the wall is a message; the offer of cosmetic surgery and fitness regimes to bring about ‘a new you’.
Across the road is a bookies called The Winning Post. Like all bookies, the promise here is money, and lots of it. Examine the form guide, follow that gut feeling or put the pin in the right name and you can change your life, perhaps significantly.
Further down the street is a wedding shop which is now closed. It’s a sad image but serves as a reminder of the massive numbers of relationships which have started with high hopes but ended in divorce. Statistics show nearly half of marriages in the UK now end that way.
A little way along is a company offering to free up your money by cashing your cheques (for a fee). Next door is a short term employment agency. Both are testament to the changed economic and employment conditions of the last few years.
Dotted along the street are boarded up store fronts, their faded signs a sad memorial to the way dreams and aspirations often end in failure.
All of these shops say something to us. They speak their message which inevitably hangs on aspiration and promise. Every one promises to release something in you that will allow you to be who you want to be. And yet inevitably, even if we use them we know things are too good to be true.
Amongst it all sits a church with a simple message. Written as boldly as possible is the name JESUS. It is the name of someone who does not change the shape of a nose or ease away crows feet and yet performs genuine and radical reformation of a person’s heart. It is the name of a man who does not promise riches or marriage or employment in this life and yet delivers more than any of those to anyone who puts their life in his hands. It is the name of a man willing to befriend the worst of people and begin a friendship more loving, caring and sacrificial than even the strongest marriage. And it is the name of a man who does not place heavy demands on a person when he needs them but rather one who has written out in perfect detail the plans he has for them.
The Kingsway is busy. So, in a few words, Mount Pleasant says to a broken world rushing past, Jesus is your answer.
What’s going on outside your church building? Who’s passing by? Do they know, do you think, what it means to hear that JESUS IS ALIVE?
