pat loughery

I’m (obviously) not blogging much recently. There are a few reasons for that – between my work and my commute, I don’t get a lot of free time, and what time I do get has been spent working to learn Drupal, which I’ll be using for the new church website, and finally, we’re focusing a lot of time, energy and prayer into figuring out what our name is. That item has taken quite a lot of focus.

I have a sense that what we name our church will carry a sense of our identity, our reason for existance. We’ve been called Mt. Si Vineyard Church Community in our previous time, a name that I find a bit cumbersome and not particularly memorable. With our replanting underway, we’re trying to discover our name.

We’re prayerfully trying on names that:
– Are “us”, that we recognize as illustrating our particular calling
– Are memorable
– Won’t feel out-of-date in 5, 10, 50 years
– Are not flavored with “Christianese” (i.e. “Tabernacle of Shekina Glory”), though we certainly are fine with names that reflect Christ – we’re trying to recognize that names can be identifying without being off-putting

It’s also an exercise for our leaders to work together, for me to learn to serve among them, and for us to listen to each other and especially to the still, small voice of God. We’ve had a couple of candidates come through, but they just didn’t fit well when we tried them on – which is frustrating becaue

The whole experience is frustrating, educational, difficult. We’re trying to figure out how we make decisions: does Pat present something to the leadership group of 4, and then we tell the church? Is the whole church involved in the discussion? Can one person’s “no, I don’t like that” restart the process? Should we just say, “skip this”, pick something generic and bland and get on to more important stuff? Are we over-spiritualizing this issue, akin to (as one of our crew illustrated), ‘God, show me which color socks to put on today’?

And yet, I continue to believe that there’s some little nugget in here for us.

Time is getting to be short for us. We have some plans for a broader unveiling before Easter, and that means that we need to have settled soon, so that we can do some graphic design, polish up the new website, etc.

Please keep us in prayer, that we’ll hear the distinct leading of God, and be able to do gather around the name that we’re going to be known as.