The Name Game

I've been assessing church planters all day for our denomination in Richmond, which is always a blast. The subject of our church's name change has come up over and over again, so I've gotta recap it here:

When we moved to Reston five years ago, the name Reston Community Church was not available. A small, ecclectic group of people were using the name for their church, which was described as having "transcendental worship" in local yellow page ads [some still appear]... which I have no idea is a good thing or a bad thing. Either way, they didn't make it. Maybe they transcended...

Back in the early 1980s a Unitarian Universalist church in Reston also called themselves Reston Community Church, but abandoned it in order to identify themselves more accurately. I can imagine the confusion it must have caused for visitors stopping in, expecting a church that actually had beliefs. =)

So after informal street surveys told us several months ago that people overwhelmingly preferred "Reston Community Church" to the other 5 names on our survey... I reluctantly embraced the change. [Sometimes people forget that change is hard on leaders too.] However, our attorney just conducted a trade name search for us to ensure that no one else has claims to it... or that we would be assuming somebody's else's debt. =) We're good to go.