21st February, 2007
DAVID ADAMS

They’re the sort of provocative, in- your-face kind of messages that demand for a response.

“Feeling Ugly? - God thinks you’re to-die for,” says one. "Would you worship Jesus if He scored 10,000 test runs?" asks another. Then, of course, there’s the most controversial of them all, the “Jesus Loves Osama” poster which sparked headlines around the world.

Malcolm Williams, director of the Fellowship for Evangelism and the Visual Arts (FEVA), says the posters - which also include a Bible verse - they’re all about provoking discussion.

“(T)hey are designed to help churches dialogue with their community...” he says. “However this comes under the greater goal of evangelism. Essentially, they're designed to help local churches evangelise...Our primary motivation is we want to see Jesus proclaimed.”

Founded in 1992, FEVA is an inter-denominational ministry established to take the Gospel into the world of visual arts.

Himself a sculptor and a former art teacher, Williams says that while the organisation has traditionally been focused on reaching visual arts students (although it does also run a ministry to working architects called “Christians by Design” and oversees a church plant in Sydney’s inner west), the last 18 months has seen it widen it’s focus to allow those with talents in the area of the visual arts to use their gifts and abilities for a wider audience.

To that end FEVA established Create, described on its website as “a meeting of encouragement where people get together to brainstorm and plan projects and activities that promote the Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ for the furtherance of his Kingdom".

Having initially produced a series of Christmas cards to raise funds for FEVA, the Create group then came up with the idea of creating posters which could be placed outside churches. At the same time, says Williams, he became aware that a ministry called Outreach Posters - run by Jeff and Lynne Blair - which had been producing monthly posters for some 18 years with just that purpose in mind was about to close down.

“We thought ‘Wow!’, this is exactly what we want to do and here was an existing user base,” he says.

Create started making posters for Outreach Posters last July and have now fully taken over the organisation including renaming it Outreach Media.

Williams says the new posters represent a new approach to those previously produced by what is now Outreach Media.

“I think there’s a more contemporary design and I think they’re - to use a contemporary word - edgier,” he says. “We’ve done a lot of culture jamming so we’ve taken advertisements from secular companies and ‘riffed’ on them, if you like.”

Ads targeted so far have included those of organisations such as Yellow Pages, Telstra and insurance giant NRMA. Anothers are more issues based, refering to the Australia's passion for cricket and or our obsession with body image.

As many as 120 churches from 12 different denominations each pay $55 a month to receive the posters (they also get a perspex box in which to display the posters). Around half of the churches who receive the posters are based in Sydney ; the other half are scattered across Australia.

While all of the posters have an edge to them, nothing could have prepared Williams and those involved with FEVA for the response they received from the “Jesus Loves Osama” poster.

“If you’d put in the phrase “Jesus Loves Osama” into the search engine Google before it all went crazy, it would have given you 26 hits and at it’s peak (after the story broke), it was giving a million hits and there was blogging from Zambia to Cairo,” he says.

“Just all around the world, everyone was discussing ‘Jesus Loves Osama’. We were delighted at that result because everyone was talking about the love of Jesus, the mechanism of salvation, the means of forgiveness, the extent of sin - all of these things which are absolutely right at the centre of the Gospel and what we want people to talk about.”

Williams says he was especially delighted with the fact that people weren’t discussing whether Jesus was fact or fiction but who Jesus is and His position on the issue of love.

“Proclaiming the Gospel, you can’t lose, and I think it did that,”he says.

THE POSTER THAT WAS READ AROUND THE WORLD: The controversial "Jesus Loves Osama" poster outside a Sydney church. PICTURE: Ramon Williams. “Proclaiming the Gospel, you can’t lose, and I think it did that,” says Williams of the 'Jesus Loves Osama' poster.

Williams recently wrote a five page letter to the churches that received the poster, outlining the response to the poster, the thought that went into its creation and dealing with some of the complaints he received in the wake of the poster - including that the message was incomplete, that it was offensive and that it was not theologically sound.

In the missive, he also talks about some of the negative reactions it has received - including crank calls and vandalism - and expresses his amazement at the Prime Minister John Howard’s comment that “the prayer priority of the church on this occasion could have been elsewhere".

“Prime Ministers and presidents, rulers and celebrities may disapprove, but that will not stop Christians showing a love for others that is confounding and challenging,” he writes.

Each of the posters is designed in conjunction with the churches they will eventually be posted outside of.

“If enough churches don’t like a poster, it will get changed,” he says. “If there’s only a few who don’t like a particular month, then they can request an alternate for that particular month.”

Williams says the challenge for those producing the posters lies in making the message interesting enough that people will come back for a second look - not an easy task given the posters' relatively small size.

“Jesus is such an amazing communicator - He turns people’s attention to what really matters,” he says. “We’re really challenged by this tiny space of a metre and a metre-and-a-half - it’s really tiny and I don’t think there’s a lot of space for cute or clever artwork, it’s got to be predominantly text. We’ve to got to get the Bible text noticed but we don’t think that’s going to happen unless people are sufficiently motivated by the primary proposition to then find out more.”

The posters are accompanied by notes which explain a poster’s design. These are put into a PDF format which churches can use as a flyer to hand out or place in a box near the posters. One church in Wangaratta even went to the extent of printing the notes that accompanied the "Jesus Loves Osama" poster on the front page of their local newspaper.

Noting that graphic artists - who all work voluntarily - are queuing up to design the posters, Williams says the challenge for those designing the posters is to continue to create posters with a varied style and tone.

“We’re trying to having a wider team of people input into the posters rather than just a small group so we do get that.”

They’re also looking for someone who can make and fix the display boxes.

“We’ve got new business inquiries and we can’t satisfy the need. We’ve got maybe eight or 10 churches we just can’t get started with because we just haven’t got someone who can build the boxes.”

Williams is passionate about keeping the posters at a high standard - to that end, they are now producing the posters in full color.

“It’s such a great point of contact,” he says. “We need them to be good.”

As for the theme of their next poster - well, we'll just have to wait and see.

But as Williams notes in his letter, the team have plenty to work with.

"There are so many Biblical themes and ideas because the Word of God is so rich," he says. "Really, there's no danger we'll run out of material."

~ www.outreachmedia.org.au

~ www.createministry.com
~ www.feva.org