Beckminster Methodist Church, Wolverhampton

It has been a bit of a dry spell for posters recently, but for some reason they have been coming thick and fast over the last few weeks (wonder why?  Hmmmm), so I shall be busy putting them up on here as soon as I can.

Here's the latest, and I shall work backwards from here.

Here's some nice font work, with discrete use of both bold and italic, plus good use of capitals, some nice framing for the 'with' and the effective foregrounding of the text over the image at the bottom right.  Would have been nice to have some colour, but it has a charming simplicity as befits a carpenter.

As for the carpentry skills featured, He is certainly displaying more than Noah, using a lot less material to save a lot more people.  Interestingly, there is a school of thought that holds that the cross was also made of gopher wood.  Unfortunately even if any relics of the True Cross could be identified for certain, no one has much of a clue what gopher wood actually was and so we will never know.  But what am I saying, this is metaphor people, appreciate it for what it is and for its beauty and power...

Moving on to comparative religion, He doesn't do quite as well against Odin, who managed to build a bridge from Earth to Heaven out of just a rainbow.  Although he did call in some outside contractors in the form of the Ice Giants, so maybe we should just call it a draw.

Cartway United Reformed and Methodist Church, Bridgnorth

A nice modern poster here from the Methodists/URCs.  Striking and simple: a black, white and red colour scheme, nicely proportioned and at a pleasing angle.  The use of courier font, gives it a nice old school typewriter effect as well, which adds to the overall charm of the poster.

It does seem though, that the keyboard doesn't have the usual QWERTY lay-out and rather bizarrely features two S keys at least - perhaps it is the result of some new ergonomic keyboard layout, with multiple versions of the most common letters (half a dozen Es, no doubt).  The only other time I have seen something similar was when a college lecturer friend of mine left a group of students unsupervised in a computer lab and they rearranged the letters on several keyboards to spell out various words, although the result was a lot less spiritual than in this case...

Regardless of all that, this is a cracking bit of design and deserves to be celebrated.

Tettenhall Wood URC

A nice simple design, although I'm still trying to decide if the colour variation on the background is a deliberate attempt to give a vaguely flame-like effect or if it is merely the result of the recent rainy weather.  Also the second part of the question lacks a question mark, which is just plain sloppy.

As for the content, I am also a little disappointed with that - the theology seems a little dated: none of this modern 'hell is the absence of God' stuff, just full on fire and brimstone (is that the yellowish tinge at the corners?) and little devils with pitchforks, presumably.  The reference is also a little dated, given that smoking is now banned on almost every form of transport, so the smoking section would actually be outside.

All in all not one of their successes - the only pluses as far as I am concerned is that it reminded me of both the 'smoking or non-smoking tickets' gag in Airplane! and the 'do you mind if I smoke?' gag in Carry On Screaming.

Let's hope for a return to form with the next one.

Tettenhall Wood URC

Here's a nice topical one from a few weeks back (not quite so topical now as I am a bit slow in getting it posted), specially for Wimbledon.

It has a great home made feel to it, the tennis balls especially cut out and stuck on to the poster.  The borders look to have been hand painted as well.  A fantastic effort, none of these pre-printed and distributed posters for this church, which gives it a real personal touch.

Simple lettering with all three apostrophes correctly used and a couple of nice colons as well: always a pleasure to see accurate punctuation.  The use of the traditional Wimbledon colours is nice, with the purple and green borders.

As for the content - nice and straight forward, but sadly just the one tennis pun.  It's a shame they couldn't have summed up the whole Christian message with a simple 'Love All'.

Still, overall it is as deserving of a round of applause as a good rally finished off with a passing shot.  Well played!

Holy Trinity Church, Hazlemere

A lovely blend here of old style black ink on day-glo yellow combined with more a modern design style to simple and striking effect.  The visuals illustrate the text nicely, but much more importantly the poster contains one of the all time great church puns.

For those of us of a certain age and geekiness the whole sun/Son pun will bring back memories of that episode in the original Star Trek series, where they beam down to a planet where the Roman Empire is still in existence and where Kirk, after some gladiatorial gadding about, discovers that the persecuted people that he took to be sun worshippers are actually worshipping the Son of God...  Obviously their planet's version of the Roman Empire missed out the whole Constantine/Milvian Bridge episode, which may well have been where ours went wrong.  Certainly Gibbon would agree.

The poster could also be open to some interesting Manichaean interpretations and those perennial pop-culture heretics of choice, the Cathars, would probably have approved.

So, in short, cracking poster, top class pun and some interesting theology to ponder.  What's not to like?

Emmanuel Church, Chesham

The First Letter of John, Chapter 4, Verse 10.
'Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins.'

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I'm struggling not to make a comment about dumbing down, but honestly - the fact they feel compelled to specify that 1 John 4:10 is from The Bible, shows a certain lack of confidence in the prospective audience.  I'd've thought the fact it was outside a church would have been a bit of a clue...  Oh well.

P.S. Thanks to Z. for providing this one.

Kinver Methodist Church

This is quite a special one for me, as it was this poster at this church, which I drove past regularly at one time, that made me decide to do this blog.  Unfortunately, by the time I had actually got round to starting it, the poster had been taken down and replaced with a practical, informative one, so I began to despair of ever being able to feature it.  However, one must learn not to allow oneself to be trapped in the Slough of Despond: ask and it shall be given you; seek and ye shall find...

Imagine my delight on driving through Kinver the other week to discover that it was back.  So without further ado, the poster that kick-started the blog, in all its super-sized glory.  Not technically a pun, just another attempt to put the methods of Mammon into the service of God, but it is still both awe inspiring and of great historic importance.