Blog | How to Find the Perfect Name for Your Church Plant

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So you’re planting a church? This almost certainly was not a decision made lightly, or without months if not years of prayer and discernment. As you start to organize all of the details for your launch, you’re going to need a name, and you’re not going to want to phone it in. Your name is your church’s first impression. It sets the tone for how you take up space in the mind of your community. Generic names will get lost in the noise, doing little to stand apart and communicate your unique and necessary role in the community. I mean, how many more Grace, Hope, and Life Churches does the world really need? These names are popular for a reason, but they’re so overdone now that they mean little anymore.

Strategic, evocative names, however, start conversations.

They help tell your church’s story and lay the foundation for a movement that lasts. Whether you’re naming a brand or a church, the best names manage to operate on multiple levels of meaning, eliciting gut feelings, emotional resonance, mental meaning, societal associations. In this article, we’ll dive into how you can build a naming strategy for finding a name that helps move your church forward and what else you should consider as you search for a name for your new church plant.

How you feel about your name matters. But what else is important?

To find a name that will help your church and get in your way, you first need a solid naming strategy. While personal preferences obviously play a role in choosing a name, naming a church isn’t the same as naming your dog. While your plant might be your “baby,” it doesn’t belong just to you and doesn’t exist to appeal only to you. Instead, what’s more important when finding a name for your church plant— aside from what you like— is what your church stands for and who it serves.

Your church’s name will be a valuable tool for communicating what you’re about and who you serve, so it’s important to be super clear on your distinct mission and your specific audience and find a name that is true to your perspective and will resonate with the people you feel called to reach.

Consider:

• What is your mission statement?
• What are your values?
• What are your priorities as a church plant?
• Why are you starting a church? What needs are you filling?
• Who are the people you want to reach?
• What do the people you serve need and want?
• What are some defining characteristics of your community?

Answering these questions will help you understand what makes your church distinct and appealing. Once you feel clear on these questions, come up with some thematic buckets to brainstorm around. For example, if you are a church that prioritizes giving back to and being active in your community, you could brainstorm names around concepts like “neighbor,” “service,” and “being the hands and feet of Christ.” These obviously aren’t names themselves, but rather categories to begin free-associating off of to find names.

Knowing who you’re not is as important as knowing who you are.

Understanding who you are and who you serve also means understanding who you’re not and who you aren’t trying to reach. For example, if you hope to reach primarily ex-church and unchurched members, you will probably want to avoid riffing off of Christianese language or obscure biblical references that will either confuse your ideal audience or, worse, turn them off.

Maybe there’s a lot of city pride where you’re based, and your audience would be attracted to a name that honors your location. Or perhaps you’re trying to reach young families that care a lot about nature and would respond well to names that take inspiration from the natural world. Do some research to avoid stepping on toes and see what’s working, but be careful not to get too bogged down by what everyone else is doing. Working off of who YOU are and who you serve is always going to lead to the best results.

Let’s call a spade a spade, a church a church.

Sometimes people want to disrupt a category and feel the need to define new language around it. Sometimes this is necessary, often it’s not. For church planters, sometimes this manifests in the aversion to the word “church” itself. I get it. You’re taking a fresh approach to Sunday morning gatherings, or for one reason or another, you don’t want to get lumped in with some facet of reputation that’s tied to the term.

But here’s the thing: if you’re planting a church, your church is a church. And people who are looking for a church— your church!— aren’t looking for “a communal spiritual experience,” or whatever other strange, convoluted term you’re substituting. You’ll be difficult to find, difficult to understand, you’ll lose folks to the scroll because they don’t recognize what they’re looking for in how you’re describing yourself.

So. Unless you really aren’t a church— in which case, hopefully you’re still finding this article useful— call yourself a church. Let people find and understand you. And then you can use the rest of your messaging, branding, and experiences to communicate what makes you so different from all the other churches out there.

Define your naming team and stakeholders.

Everyone involved in your church plant is going to have an opinion about the name. And that’s natural— this is something they’re part of and have to stand behind. But remember rule number one? You and your team are not the audience for your church. What you and your team thinks of the name is significantly less important than what the folks you are trying to reach think of your name.

Define your naming stakeholders and ensure all of them are aligned on your naming strategy, or, better yet, arrive at the naming strategy together. When it comes to naming, more brains are better than one. The more minds you have working together, the more ideas and connections you’ll find. You can bounce ideas off each other and arrive at things you’d never find just on your own. That being said— too many brains without proper context will derail the entire process. There’s nothing like coming up with a selection of strategic, compelling names just for them to get cut down by someone who doesn’t understand what you’re trying to do.

Ideate from your theme categories and always refer back to your naming strategy to make sure the names you’re considering are in alignment with who you are and who you want to reach. With your strategy in place and agreed upon by all stakeholders, you can eliminate personal preference ping-pong and instead go back to your naming strategy when judging whether it is a good fit or not for your church plant.

Choosing a name for your church plant is a significant decision, and we hope this article helps you navigate the process with ease. Ultimately, however, the most important aspect of your church’s name is the love, grace, and truth it represents. So, seek God’s guidance and do your best to choose a name that reflects the heart of your ministry. With prayerful consideration and a little bit of strategy and creativity, we know you’ll find the perfect name for your church plant.