A good idea gone bad

I am sure that the person who invented signs for church vans thought it was a classic idea. What better way to advertise your church then when you are driving around town, picking up people for your services or programs, that you are a church? Throw your name on there, some contact information, and it's a low cost, low effort marketing tool that raises awareness of your church. Brilliant. Except for two things:

• People still drive the church van, meaning that inevitable you are going to cut someone off, change lanes without signaling, roll through a stoplight, tailgate, drive too slow, whatever, and when you commit said traffic violation, the person who's about ready to show you their appreciation for your crazy skills now gets to associate said traffic violations with your church. This case alone is not worth it.
• Youth ministries primarily use church vans. I'm not ripping on youth ministries here, but I was sure glad that the two youth ministries I spent 10+ years in did not have the church's name on it. Especially when my group was kicked out of Fargo's mall. Twice. Nothing worse than being escorted out of the mall by a rent a cop only for him to see us heading to our van with the church's name on it (though he probably already figured that out by looking at our color coded trip shirts).

If you are going to put your church name on your van, you may want to add one of those "don't like my driving (my youth group, my men's/women's group, etc", call . . ." bumper stickers. And then give them a different church's number!