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So, you’ve started a church plant. You’ve gathered together a few faithful families and individuals from within a community, and you’re likely now meeting in homes, rented office space, or more likely — a public school building. Hopefully, you’ve decided (and founded your church) upon sound doctrinal tenets and have identified at least a few church leaders.
Your next order of business — even before you secure adult-sized folding chairs and an electronic drum machine — is to decide up on a church name. While there’s ample biblical precedent for the naming of animals, textual support for the naming of a church is scant.
Thankfully, we evangelicals (who are typically disoriented without written instruction) have found a way to remedy this. I’m not sure as to the origins of the method, but the system below can account for approximately 83.585 percent of all evangelical churches. It’s really a rather simple process.
STEP ONE: Start with the list of words below:
Of course, one could readily add the word “Pointe” into the mix above, but by all means, make sure that the trailing “e” is in place if you want to look like a bona fide evangelical church. Otherwise, congregants might miss the “point.”
STEP TWO: Take any combination of the words listed above, in any order, add to them your denominational (or lack thereof) appellation, and tack on the word “Church” at the end (unless you’re really progressive, then you might want to go with “gaggle of Christ-followers,” or “seekers”). Voila! Your church now has a name.
There will be outliers, of course — the Chevrolet Missionary Baptist Church I once spotted while driving through rural Kentucky certainly didn’t fit the mold — but as a general rule, the system works pretty well.
Are there any other church-name-words that I’ve missed? Comments (33) 33 Comments JSullivanSeptember 29th, 2010 | 2:59 pm | #1
Do my bone fides increase by stringing together additional words from the list? And if so, is it a linear or exponential scale?
How about using the word “Liberal” in Step One?
Won’t that be part of a good name for an Evangelical Church?
Names do tell a story. What comes to mind when you hear of a church with these in their names?
ZionMercySt. … (you pick)TabernacleTempleSecond … or any church that strings together more than four words in its name?
“Trinity” and “Gospel” should be in the list.
The one that still gets me is “Full Gospel”.
I’m always fond of the “New Testament Bible Church” moniker myself. For one, it’s (we hope accidentially) Marcionite on its face, and second, I’ve read the New Testament and I’m not quite sure those are the churches we want to emulate. (1st Church of Corinth, anyone?).
Or how about the 1st Church of Liberal Laodicea?
Truth-in-advertising, eh?
Well you folks are obviously not familiar with the truly cutting edge. These days the supercoolreallyawesomeemergentevangelicalseekerfriendly ______ (supply your own trendy term of art here) ummmm “fellowship” would not be caught dead appending “church” to it’s cherished moniker. Much better to go with a single or at most two word “brand”. In our area we have The River, New Hope, The Summit, Emmaus Way, Connections, The Ark and so on. One of these days one of these fellowships is going to go the full Prince route and simply brand themselves as some sort of unpronounceable symbol. One can hardly wait for the advance of the Kingdom that such a move would protend.
Jeremy beat me to it.
One of our local churches is “The Bridge.” Everything happens in zero to sixty minutes. Not 59 minutes, not 61: 60.
I was looking for “Community” and there it was in your list. For churches with perhaps lesser aspirations or a different focus, you can substitute “Family.”
Our church has the very ordinary moniker of Central Presbyterian Church. My wife and I got married in a First Presbyterian Church. My experience is that Presbyterian churches in Canada are far more likely than their American counterparts to be named for a saint, e.g., St. Cuthbert, St. Columba, St. Andrew (a definite favourite).
I know of a place that beats them all and does so with only one word: Reality.
Look it up.
I think you need “House” or “Lighthouse” on your list.
What about Bethany, Bethel, Beroea, Smyrna, Mars Hill and other geographical designations? But, no, I’ve never run across an evangelical church named for Corinth, Gomorrah, Ninevah or Constantinople.
I think i mentioned in a previous comment on a post that the Baptist General Conference changed its branding name to Converge Worldwide. ‘nough said.
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