What is the purpose of a name for a church? It certainly helps if you want to ‘market’ your church – but should we market it? It helps if you want a yellow page listing – but do you want a yellow page listing? It helps to have a name if you want to put a sign out front or a newspaper ad with service times – but do we want to put a sign out front? It strikes me that signs and yellow pages are all the trappings of the business world...and what do we communicate by appropriating those tools and that model into church? Does that tend to undermine or to honor our message?

If you want to boast about starting a church, it helps to have a name. If you want status because you belong to a cool church, it helps to have a name. If you want to develop an ego about being pastor of a certain church, the church will need a name.

With all these bad reasons to get a name, are there any good reasons?

Some say you need a name to reach people, to get people to come. After all, without a name, how do people find about the church and attend? The answer: they are invited. Personally. Its not a closed club or cliché. Everyone is invited. To “church.” Without a name, the invitation would tend to be a longer, more meaningful conversation. You would have to describe what you are inviting them to in a descriptive sentence, instead of with use of an arcane or trendy name. Most important, without a name, a sign and listing, the invitation could only be personal, which could actually be cool.
Here’s why: over time, our church members will grow more connected, intimate, and vulnerable. Shared trust will develop, and this level of trust will enrich the times of worship and fellowship. Brand new people showing up will tend to lower the trust/vulnerability level, because they are unknowns. Especially brand new people who are just dropping in because they saw a sign, or a newspaper ad. But a new person who was personally invited by another member is a totally different dynamic. There is some transfer of trust, since people know that the new person was invited by John, and that invitation came out of a relationship with me, and that can be trusted.

It seems that every concern about having a name can be reduced to an interest in ‘growing’ the numbers of the church, but at a certain cost. You may grow, but you’ve already started acting a little like a business. You may grow, but you will tend toward an audience of superficial consumers.

All this led me to ask what they called churches in the very beginning. Did they come up with cool names like ‘QUEST’ ?

I’m not a scholar on these matters, but I think they just called themselves the church at Ephesus or the church at Phillipi, etc. etc.

So we could call ourselves ‘the church in Blacktown’ but that might sound incredibly pretentious and self-righteous. There are lots of churches in Bl;acktown. (when every church has its own distinct name even within one city, does that help us think of the church as unified or fractured?)

So what do I call it when I personally invite someone? I would say “we’re part of the church in Blacktown.”

So there you have it. What do you see as pros and cons of name or no-name?

Me? I’m still thinking about it.

Mark Pierson October 05, 2005. www.urbanseed.org
(This column also appears at www.sacramentis.com )