Should You Rename Your Church - What we decided as we considered it

I remember when my first church had to get a new street sign made. It made perfect sense to consider at that time renaming our church and re-branding ourselves before building out a new permanent church sign.

Here is what our leadership team did and decided.

Factors we Considered

We evaluated dropping our Presbyterian brand from our name for various reasons —

What does “Presbyterian” mean?
Some people can’t spell or say Presbyterian
We were embarrassed by our denomination
Most of our attenders didn’t have a Presbyterian background,
There are 16 Presbyterian denominations (or whatever the number was at the time).

As a church, we held to a presbytery style of government, with congregationally elected elders, versus a bishop driven or congregational system. We did hold to the historic creeds of the Presbyterian Church.

But were these enough positive or negative factors to rename our church and drop the Presbyterian name from our marketing?

Would we Rename our Church?

Our leadership team studied church growth books, listened to marketers, and pondered the issue until it could be pondered no more.

Would we be denying our heritage?
Would removing the name rename our church?
Would we loose something in dropping the brand?
What would unchurched people think, if they cared?

Did we rename our church?

We chose not to rename our church.

For us, it came down to filling the white space on the size sign that we ordered with a decent image. It wasn’t a spiritual matter, but a practical matter.

We chose not to rename our church since it was part of our congregational slang. We were “xxxxx Prez.”

This term had become such common parlance that our newsletter used it, our marketing used it, and even our website!

We kept it simply because it was part of our existing brand identity, and we were not entirely up to the challenge of a complete rebranding of our small church of under 150 people.