No Loitering!

During a close-to-midnight walk through downtown Connersville the other night with Alicia, I noticed a sign on a fence alongside one of the town’s more prominent church’s. “No Loitering” it read. As is becoming more and more fun for me, I snapped a picture of it.

I can understand shop owners not wanting people standing around, disrupting their businesses. But why a church would display a “No Loitering” sign on their fence escapes me. I can think of two possibilities.

• The sign is an encouragement for Christians in attendance to not stand idly by afterwards but to actively be about the Lord’s service! Amen, hallelujah!
• Or, more likely, the sign is a warning to those who would simply spend their time standing around at the side of the road, leaning on the fence with friends during the evenings after schools and jobs have been satisfied for the day. Here’s a radical idea: When Providence allows for unbelievers to be within a stone’s throw of the church, preach the Word! I can only help but think that if a church is unwilling to preach to Gospel on “their own territory,” there’s no chance on earth that they would go out into the highways and hedges:”(Luke 14:23)”: to do so.

I might very well be reading to much into the sign, but if a church building is sanctified or set aside for the Lord, it seems as though it would be governed by the Lord’s precepts.

And turning away those who would congregate together who likely (quite unknowingly) are in danger of Hellfire rather than proclaiming the Gospel to them… That doesn’t seem like the Lord’s style at all.