A tour of Church Messages - part 2

On Boxing Day, I ran past 15 churches in Kowloon, to see what messages are they sending out to the street from their front doors.  My conclusion was: “not much”.  There were a couple of Nativity scenes from Catholic churches, and a proclamation of peace from a Lutheran church.  Otherwise most churches have little or nothing to say related to Christmas. 

Today, on the last but one day of 2020, I want to make sure I have a sufficiently wide coverage of different types of churches.  Hence I ran to another bunch of 10 churches. 

Hop Yat Church Kowloon Church 中華基督教會合一堂九龍堂

HKSKH Christ Church 香港聖公會基督堂

Kowloon Tong Alliance Church 九龍塘宣道會

Christian Central Church (Kowloon Tong) 基督中心堂(九龍塘)

The Church of Christ in China Cheung Lo Church 中華基督教會長老堂

The Church of Christ in China Mandarin Church 中華基督教會國語堂

Mongkok Swatow Baptist Church 旺角潮語浸信會

Grace Hong Kong Evangelical Church 香港宣教會恩磐堂

The Church of Christ in China Shum Oi Church 中華基督教會深愛堂

HKSKH Saint Thomas' Church 香港聖公會聖多馬堂

The vast majority of the 25 churches I have visited so far either have their own buildings, or are at the ground level of multi-storey buildings, with a main entrance on the street.    

Only one or two are on the upper floors of buildings.  For those, if is difficult to have a street level presence.  Hence I am leaving them out of my observations. 

Some of the churches are located in upscale residential areas such as Kowloon Tong.  Some of them are English speaking.  These churches seem to have the least to say to the people on the street.  One of the reasons for that may be that there are few pedestrians on the sidewalks in those areas.  However, many of them are on busy streets or even main roads.  They could conceivably send messages to the many drivers and passengers in the vehicles which pass by all the time.  Presumably they do their reaching out through their own members, friends and relatives, etc.      

Some are in mixed business / residential areas such as Mongkok.  Most of these also have few messages related to Christmas.  With the exception of one or two that says “Peace”.  Some do have information about online worships services in lieu of regular services because of the pandemic.

Some are in residential areas close to public housing.  Most also do not have explicit Christmas messages.  But many do have a lot of information on their programs and activities.  It would appear that they make the hardest effort to reach out to the people on the street, who can be of all kinds.  But it is easy to see that rich people don’t usually come this way.    

The loudest Christmas messages seem to be coming from Catholic churches, as I reported earlier.  Their door also seems to be most open.  

I set out to find out about the messages that churches are sending out to the people on the streets.  At the end, I realised that having no message is actually an important message by itself.  I also suspect that the way a church reaches out may have a big impact on what kind of congregation it gets.