Glorious Mud

I knew when I announced that The Journey: Metro East would transition toward becoming an independent, autonomous church that I was in for a lot of conversations.  I was prepared to work hard to cast vision clearly, honestly, and compellingly.  So, I haven't be surprised by the need to cast vision - and then to do it again in short time.  It isn't surprising - we are getting ready to do something that just isn't done very often.  Healthy hives are rare enough, but the transition of a video venue to an autonomous church is as rare as finding a snipe on a snipe hunt. I have come to see that church splits are actually quite easy at least in the beginning.  All you have to do is rally people around a "common enemy."  Just gather people together by what you all don't like or are angry about - and that gives momentum to the vision.  (This can only last for awhile, though.  Eventually all that sinful negativity will sap all the energy out of the church ...

So - we are transitioning our campus, The Journey: Metro East, into an independent local church.  As a result, we will be forming our own mission statement, core values, and, of course, a name.  Since we are a daughter church of The Journey, we will bear many similarities to our mother church - it is simply in our DNA. But we did have to come up with a new name.  Easy enough right?  Yeah, right.  We started by brainstorming possible names - and came up with an initial list easy enough.  The initial list was long but got shorter as we weeded out all the sarcastic suggestions.  It was eventually shortened to a few that seemed to stand out to us.  We were looking for names that would have spiritual significance and would speak to our unique identity in the Metro East. A conversation with one of my leaders drove home the importance of a church name.  She was walking far from God in 2005 when she was driving through Maplewood and saw one of ou...