How we named our church Village was an interesting journey.

About 6 months ago when we were early stages of team development we brought a name to the team. That name was the Junction Church.

We had arrived at that name through a simple process of looking at our values, vision and heart and a thesaurus and synonym search engine. the result was The Junction Church. We took it to the team and it didn’t stick.

What it did do was cause people to ask why they hadn’t had a say in it. This was a massive learning for us. We prayed about it, apologised, canned the name and the branding that had been developed around it and set off on a new journey of discovery.

That next process was a series of conversations, starting with who we are and what sort of vibe we want people to experience when they encounter us.

Then we went to the scriptural foundational passages which we have held onto. We used our key scriptures and ask the team to pray on and reflect what themes were coming through these readings. What was evoked for them?

Then we all had a month of prayer and asked for people to give us their suggestions.

There were about 20 suggestions. Then we asked people to vote. We gave them two votes in support of a name and one vote against (if they hated an idea).

This took us to four finalists.

We then did two things. We did a poll with our friends who didn’t know Jesus to see which they liked most, and we did a google search on what was being used in what capacity and where.

the result of this landed us with two choices. We’re not going to tell you what they were in case you really love the one to which we said ‘no’.

With these two suggestions before us, Ori and I prayed and we unanimously chose Village. We then secured the website we wanted that we felt captured people: www.yourvillage.church and told the team that we were now known as the village.

People loved it and it stuck.