Favorite Child

You’ll never get what you deserve at the hand of God.

In these post-COVID days, many of us are concerned about finding ways to entice people back to church. Here’s a question for you: If you had to devise a bumper-sticker slogan to get people to take a good look at your church, what would you write?

The United Church of Christ came out with a marketing campaign a few years back, built around the slogan, “God is still speaking.” Not bad. It’s short and catchy. It captures that progressive denomination’s openness to change.

For many years, the United Methodist Church got a lot of mileage out of “Open Hearts. Open Minds. Open Doors.” It says, “We’re a friendly, tolerant bunch — and by the way, did you happen to notice we’ve got an open door here?”

There was a Baptist group a while back that tried “Be kind, be merry, be Baptist.” The word “merry” may not be the first one most people think of when it comes to Baptists, but hey, it’s worth...