Touchdown Jesus Struck by Lightning to Burn to Ground

June 16, 2010 by underthesea

All sixty-two feet of Jesus Christ--King of King--burned to the ground. Nicknamed Touchdown Jesus, the $250,000 statue was struck by lightning during an Ohio thunderstorm.

The "King of Kings" sculpture, 62 feet tall and 40 feet wide at the base, showed Jesus from the torso up and was actually nicknamed Touchdown Jesus--Jesus' arms were raised like a ref signaling a touchdown. King of Kings was made of plastic foam and fiberglass over a steel frame--the frame is all that survived.

The King of Kings statue was one of southwest Ohio's most familiar landmarks, built in 2004 at the evangelical Solid Rock Church along Interstate 75 in Monroe--where the 4,000-member, nondenominational church was founded by a former horse trader Lawrence Bishop and his wife. Bishop and his wife financed the statue in 2004--stating his goal in erecting the "King of Kings" was in trying to help people, not impress them. Bishop said his wife proposed the Jesus statue as a beacon of hope and salvation-spending roughly $250,000 to finance it.

Hopefully Jesus was insured.

A lightning strike set the statue on fire around 11:15 p.m., when "King of Kings" burned to the ground. No one was injured. Travelers on Interstate 75 often were startled to come upon the huge statue, once roadside--the amount of stopping travelers was so huge that church officials had to build a walkway to accommodate them.