Driving through Northwest Arkansas, Sharon and I came across this church sign and were reminded of the account in Acts 20 of a young fellow who fell asleep during one of Paul’s messages. Unconscious, he tumbled out of an upper story window and died from the impact. But Paul hurried down to the street and performed a miracle of resuscitation. 

I had to wonder who decided on the text for this church sign. Was it the pastor, trying to attract people by his humor? Or a cranky church member taking matters into his own hands? Either way, it supplied an arresting counterbalance to the PR deliverances of the typical church.

Coincidentally, I’d been reading through a 1960 Eerdmans book called Eutychus (and his pin). It’s a collection of a pseudonymous columns by Edmund Clowney, appearing in the first one hundred issues of Christianity Today, edited by Carl F. H. Henry. Clowney wrote under the heading “Eutychus and His Kin,” and the reference to a “pin” in the book title connects with his efforts to employ a straight pin “to use in deflating ecclesiastical pretense.” 

For instance, he imagined a Madison Avenue pitch for a church, playing off cigarette ads: “First Church has reduced theological irritants to the lowest level among all leading pulpits. First Church preaching is smooth. It’s First for filtered truth!” And then there was the pastor penning some verse for his sermon on Psalm 87 (“Glorious things of thee are spoken, Zion, city of our God.”) The text got him thinking about the gospel’s reach to the range of Gentiles, and he wrote:

For Wu and Suki,

Mbuyong, O’Brien,

They too are reckoned

With the sons of Zion.

Elsewhere, he gives us a ministerial taxonomy, including Ecclesiasticus Ectomorphus (“Solid supporter of church suppers, bake sales, teas”); Clericus Mesomorphus (“Enthusiastic keystone of young men’s activities, notably at second base on the soft-ball field . . . Casualties from handclasps at the door”); Doctorandus Endormorphus (“His immortal sermons never die, they just fade away . . . He can sometimes recall the name of a parishioner by associating him with a Continental scholar”); Predicandus Amorphus (“All things to all men . . . Man of many deep convictions which last for days”); and Tyranothesuarus Rex (“. . . who hurls synonyms like thunderbolts and defies you to break into his conversation”).

On this model, Eastside Church of Christ might redo their sign to read (and forgive my “Latin”) “Homileticus Soporificus.”