What's in a name?

Christian Century, Jan 25, 2003 by John Dart

In that vein, Michael J. Cox, director of new church planting for the American Baptist Churches, observed, "If you don't have a good ministry and program, all the name changes won't help." In fact, he said, a name change is a low priority. "It would be putting the cart before the horse."

Dropping the denomination's name or making other changes--such as calling the church a "center" or "fellowship"--is a trend that first became prominent in western states, and is slow to be discussed in the South or Northeast, Cox said. For a struggling congregation attempting to "restart" or relocate, picking a new name may be an option, he said.

"The issue is probably most relevant to `de-churched folk' who were upset by what their old churches were like," Cox said. "For the `unchurched person' who is struggling with life and wants a caring community, I don't think the name of the church is going to matter." Yet when a name change accompanies a refurbished program, some find it hard to determine how much each change contributed to improvement.

Some liberal or apolitical Baptist churches think about distancing themselves from newsmaking fundamentalist Baptists. In the Chicago area, Cornell Baptist Church, with an activist history on the South Side, changed its name to Ellis Avenue Church in g001 as it broke with the Southern Baptist Convention. The deciding factor was an SBC statement about wives playing a subservient role in the family; the church joined the moderate Alliance of Baptists. In the northern suburb of Evanston, the openly liberal First Baptist Church changed its name to Lake Street Church of Evanston in 1995.

The church has been transformed, "but not just by changing the name," said Robert Thompson, pastor since 1980 of the American Baptist congregation. "We didn't want to say we were Baptists--because of Falwell and the Southern Baptists' turn to the right," Thompson said. Along with the name change, the congregation began a "program of transformation" encouraging greater member commitment. "In my first 1,5 years here, the church had not grown and we had about 80 or 90 people on Sunday morning," he said. "It's at about 300 now and we continue to grow."

Some churches pick names such as Lakeside, Mountain View or Crosswinds as substitutes for the name of a specific city or street, based partly on the notion that some people don't want to identify with a specific locale. "They want a place name that evokes a sense of peacefulness, although place is still somewhat important," said Scott Thumma, a faculty associate at Hartford Seminary Institute for Religion Research.

With a sense of marketing akin to corporate research, a conservative congregation may seek to soften its image by switching from "Bible Baptist Church" to "Grace Fellowship." A Michigan church with 4,000 members changed from Temple Baptist to North Ridge Church three years ago. "People thought that the word `temple' meant that we were some kind of Jewish Messianic Baptist conglomeration," pastor Brad Powell told the Detroit Free Press.