10 December, 2007

Church Begins Using O-Slashes and Umlauts to Attract Younger Crowds

Duluth, Minnesota - With churches struggling to attract new members these days, many denominations have begun trying new "creative" ways of recruiting visitors to their churches. Examples include various churches in one town offering "coupons" to church shoppers, a church holding a weekly "solid rock" concert to attract old rockers, and one church holding a "throwed communion" service. And recently the Lutheran Church of the Good Shepherd in Duluth joined the ranks of churches attracting new younger crowds through "creative outreach."

"We had been looking for ways to attract more youth" said pastor Røger Märrïs. "I began looking up things on the internet that kids were attracted to, and one thing in particular caught my eye - Scandinavian rock bands. It turns out lots of kids love these hard rock heavy metal bands. Well, all of them had one thing in common, they all had these awesome looking characters in their logos like slashed o's and umlauts. I saw that and I said, 'that's our answer right there.'"

Märrïs, immediately spoke with the church council about how the church could utilize this idea. The decision was made to start by changing the church sign.

"Changing the church sign was a good place to start because it was so easy" said council member Ëlïzäbëth Løwrëy. "We just added some dots here and there and a couple of slashes to make it look really serious."

The next decision that was made was that the pastor and other members of the church would alter their names to include the characters also.

"We felt to make things more genuine that some of us needed to change our names a little" said member Ålbërt Møønïë. "That way this new crowd would really be impressed with how hip we are here."

While many have been excited about the changes, the results have not been what they had hoped for.

"Unfortunately we really haven't attracted the young heavy metal crowd that we though we would get" said Märrïs. "What we have attracted is more Scandinavians, which we're really not equipped to minister to here since no one here speaks a Scandinavian language. Last week we had three couples show up from Finland, one from Sweden and a guy from Denmark, all thinking we were some kind of special Scandinavian church. When we told them what we were doing they didn't seem to understand."

"We're going to give it a little more time" said Møønïë. "What we might have to do is just better publish information about our Wørshïp Sërvïcë in the local newspaper or something.

9 comments:

Richard said...

I have to be honest, Dr. Tom. I'm a Baptist seminary student, but as soon as I saw the sign for this Lutheran church, I felt a stirring in my soul that told me "Hey, this is the place to go. What an uber cool church sign".

I tried to find that church's address, but I couldn't. Do you have it?

Anonymous said...

To me, a circular character with a slash through it is a "0" (zero). (I also make "7"s and "Z"s with lines in them to distinguish them from "1"s and "2"s.)

As for the dots above the letters, someone needs to clean the spots off the sign!

If I saw such a sign written in something that is supposed to pass for English, I would think that the folk there were "zeros", for it tells me that they either can't spell or that they ran out of "O"s (Ohs).

But then, this is supposed to be a joke, so I'll leave it at that.

Rioni Unchained said...

Actually, only the Norwegian and Danish languages among the Scandanavian languages use the ø symbol -- among the other languages, only a and o are used umlauted, and even then not always in certain countries. In some languages, such as Icelandic, you are much more likely to see a regular accent rather than a diaresis. The Finnish language in fact is not a Scandinavian language at all, nor are the Finnish people culturally Scandinavians, but are rather ethnically and linguistically related to the Hungarians. Umlauted A and O only exist in their alphabet so that they can write Swedish loan words.

Anonymous said...

This l00ks g00d.
We should also put those typed happy and sad faces (whatever they're called) on our church signs - maybe after happy or sad verses. Ex: The wages of sin is death :(
etc.
This should attract the web-savvy.
And we can use blog lingo like lol - maybe after a verse about election! (Just so they don't get mad.)

Anonymous said...

"Lu7h3r4n (hur(h 0f 7h3 600d 5h3ph3rd" would be good too. Sermons could be sent as text messages to congregants' cell phones and PDA's.

Anonymous said...

Having grown up near Duluth - his is way to close to reality to be satire!

Darrel Davis said...

Hey wait a second...something is fishy here. Those photos look like they have been photoshopped... Could there be a scandal down at TTBN? TTBN must be running out of good storys they have to create their own? I call for an investigation!!! :-)

Johnny Techno said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Johnny Techno said...

Иïçë wörǩ. ;)