10, he went to Nashville to perform at the Christian Country Music Awards Show. Together with his wife, he built it into a megachurch on a 100-acre campus with its own Bible college and music amphitheater.įour years ago Mr. He opened Solid Rock Church with 12 members above a fire station in 1978. He bought his first horse for $25 at the age of 10 and, though it was blind, sold it for $250 and went on to become one of the nation's biggest quarter horse dealers. Bishop, now 63, was born in the Appalachian village of Zag, Ky. That it turned into something much bigger than envisioned was entirely apt, given the couple's own lives. The Bishops' original idea was for a sculpture of Jesus that was no larger than life-size. Others call it Super Jesus, MC 62ft Jesus (for the technomusician of a similar name) or simply Big J. ![]() Many locals call it Touchdown Jesus, since, a bit like the famed mural at the University of Notre Dame, it resembles a robed and bearded referee signaling a score at the goal line. Postcards for sale in the church's gift shop refer to it as the King of Kings. There is also a running disagreement over the statue's name. Cars have hit the cable 183 times since then, and in three of those cases, crashes have occurred within three-tenths of a mile of the church. Officials at the Ohio Department of Transportation attribute the improved safety to a $1.1-million high-tension cable that the department built in the freeway's median about the time, coincidentally, that the statue was erected. "Can't too much go wrong next to a big statue of Jesus," said one member of the church, James Nelms, 23. Since the statue went up more than two years ago, there have been no such crossover deaths. Twelve people died along that 15-mile stretch of I-75 in the two years before the image was erected, eight of them killed after cars jumped the median into oncoming traffic. Some congregants say the statue keeps watch over a section of freeway that was once among the most dangerous in Ohio. The completed figure weighs 16,000 pounds and, at 62 feet, stands 20 feet taller than originally planned, though its skin is so thin that it bends to the touch of a finger. The builder, James Lynch, then spent three months ripping the fiberglass apart and recasting the outstretched arms and upturned face. But when workers started installing the statue on an island in a man-made reflecting pool behind the church, they found that the head and arms were too small for the chest. The image's steel frame was built in nearby Lebanon, Ohio, and the body, made of Styrofoam and fiberglass, on the beach in Jacksonville, Fla. The statue, erected in 2003, was the inspiration of Lawrence and Darlene Bishop, evangelical Christian pastors of the 3,400-member Solid Rock Church here, which spent $250,000 on a project that did not go smoothly. ![]() "It sort of looms out at you, especially at night," said Aaron Andrews, a trucker from Milwaukee. Jesus, depicted from the waist up, is six stories tall and seems to burst from the ground, as if he might gather a tractor-trailer in his Honda-size hands and lift it to heaven.Īfter dark, the figure is illuminated by spotlights from below. ![]() Then he is gone, hidden behind a gas station.ĭrive another quarter-mile up Interstate 75, past the billboards for Bristol's Strip Club and Trader's World Flea Market, and suddenly the image appears in all its full dimensions. MONROE, Ohio - Jesus first appears in a flash, a white statue rising from the flat cornfields 40 miles north of Cincinnati.
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