I was driving through town, and I noticed the logo on a Ford truck and was impressed by how well the artwork has held up since the 1920s. This made me think of companies that have tried to change their brand or image over the years, sometimes with regrettable consequences. Other companies, however, have stayed with their traditional artwork, even if it was not fashionable at a given moment. That artwork has become the fixed image of the company.

Reformed Christianity has a classic brand that has only occasionally been hip. There were a couple of moments in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries when it might have been fashionable, in certain circles, to identify with the Reformed confession. Otherwise, we have generally been on the margins.

That living on the edge of the culture, on the edge of the mainstream life of the more socially and religiously acceptable churches, places pressure on the Reformed to try to rebrand or reimage ourselves, as the consultants say, to give potential consumers the idea that we are what they want.

In the 1980s there was a significant movement to rebrand Reformed and Presbyterian churches as “community” churches. Today the fad is to take on an emergent-sounding name. There are several of those in my part of the world. The point of such rebranding is to make what is odd seem a little less odd, to make it conform to the surrounding religious or secular culture.

There is nothing wrong with being appropriately sensitive to the surrounding culture. It is highly insensitive and even foolish for a missionary to preach in English to natives who do not speak English. When I was a pastor in Kansas City, we changed the name of our congregation from Hope Reformed to Walnut Creek Presbyterian. I don’t think that we sold out. People in our neighborhood were unfamiliar with the Reformed tradition. Our unscientific research told us that people were confused about what we were. In other words, our name was not communicating what we were, so it seemed as if “Presbyterian” might say something true that more folk could understand.

Calling ourselves “community” churches or adopting trendy emergent-sounding names is not just being sensitive, however. “Community” is a powerful religious word in a country like the United States where people tend to be suspicious of outsiders making decisions about their church or religious life. Such suspicion is born of the American tendency toward autonomy (a law unto oneself) and egalitarianism (flattening out distinctions) that has dominated American Christianity since the early nineteenth century.

To label a congregation “community” signals that a congregation is, at best, only loosely related to others and control is local and determined by the local community. This is not quite the same thing as original jurisdiction. Reformed and Presbyterian churches are not truly “community” churches in polity or sociology. Few confessional Reformed/Presbyterian churches are populated by nearby members. Most confessional Presbyterian and Reformed congregations are commuter congregations. In polity, Reformed/Presbyterian churches hold to a connectional arrangement of church government so that no congregation is completely autonomous. They are always accountable to other congregations and to higher or broader assemblies.

Whatever confessional Reformed/Presbyterians call themselves and however much they seek to imitate the more well-populated evangelical churches in the culture, few of them are genuinely hip. The music is always just a little dated, and the presentation and performance are marked by the (sometimes guilty) self-consciousness of people speaking a foreign language or doing something that does not come naturally. The truth is that we are not hip.

Then, of course, there is the futility of keeping up with fashion. How long will the emerging- sounding names last? Is not the emerging “thing” already sort of passé? I cannot imagine that the folk who were attracted to warehouses and coffee are now going to be attracted to otherwise conventional buildings sporting a trendy new name. How often will congregations have to reinvent themselves to stay current?

It seems that Ford has made changes to their brand over the years, but in the main, those changes seem to have been rather modest. There was apparently a twenty-five-year period where they did not use the blue badge on their vehicles but kept using it on their letterhead, and then, in the 1970s they brought it back for use on vehicles. It was a return to form. It might not have looked “space age” in the 1950s and 1960s, but what looks goofier now than something that says “space age”? The space age stuff came and went, and the classic endures.

Maybe we can learn from Ford? Perhaps it is better simply to be what we are? It probably will not be hip, but if we are faithful to our confession and convictions, we will be genuine, that what people really lack and need. Have the lost ever come to our congregations to ask what the latest fad is? I doubt it. When Christians tire of the “Church of What’s Happening Now,” here we will be offering Christ, teaching the faith, providing catechetical instruction, praying for and loving one another, ministering to the necessities of the congregation, and seeking to make the glory of Christ known to the nations.

©R. Scott Clark. All Rights Reserved.

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Post authored by:

• R. Scott Clark

  

  R.Scott Clark is the President of the Heidelberg Reformation Association, the author and editor of, and contributor to several books and the author of many articles. He has taught church history and historical theology since 1997 at Westminster Seminary California. He has also taught at Wheaton College, Reformed Theological Seminary, and Concordia University. He has hosted the Heidelblog since 2007.

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