Wednesday, December 23, 2015

What's your church's tagline?

What’s your church's tagline? Reflecting marketing trends in contemporary culture, many churches use a tagline to express something either about their identity, vision, or priorities. There are even helpful guides available to assist in creating such taglines.  Here's a few examples, older and newer, of such church branding efforts:

> Where Everybody is Somebody and Christ is Lord
> Exalting the Savior, Equipping the Saints, & Evangelizing the Sinner
> Where the Difference is Worth the Distance
> The End of Your Search for a Friendly Church
> Caring, Sharing, & Connecting
> Large Enough to Serve You, Small Enough to Know You

A well-written, pithy tagline can sometimes help unify your church's focus as well as connect with your community.  However, we need to be honest.  These taglines are often more prescriptive than descriptive.  What if, suddenly, all our taglines became brutally honest in their descriptive accuracy? Would we see:

Where Everybody is Somebody and Christ is Lord
Where Some People are Important and Convenience is King

Exalting the Savior, Equipping the Saints, & Evangelizing the Sinner
Exalting our Egos, Entertaining the Crowd, & Exaggerating the Stats

Where the Difference is Worth the Distance
Where There's Little Difference Except the Distance

The End of Your Search for a Friendly Church
The End of Your Search for a Dysfunctional Church (and beginning for a healthy one)

Caring, Sharing, & Connecting
Carrying (grudges), Sharing (gossip), & Connecting (for business opportunities)

Large Enough to Serve You, Small Enough to Know You
Large Enough to be Complacent, Small Enough to Need You

Please don’t misunderstand me; I like and use taglines. I’ve even used a couple of the above examples in the past.  However, the distance between the envisioned and the actual has caused me to move away from the indicative and embrace the imperative.  For example: “Be Different. Make a Difference.”  This reflects our vision for the church and encourages us to fulfill that vision.

But, I want to interject another thought here.  Is there an unwritten tagline every New Testament church ought to pursue?  I believe there is:  "A One-Another Church.”  If such were descriptively true, then we wouldn't even need to use it as a published tagline, because it would be read through a living display of the Gospel. 

But what are the one-anothers and what relevance do they hold for the contemporary church?  Glad you asked.  In a future post, we’ll discuss exactly that, and I’ll share the results of my in-depth study.

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