Why Our Team Name

Our team name As a team we’ve not really had a name to go by, we’ve just told people that we’re starting a new church on Harold Hill. To be honest we were keen to hold off giving ourselves a name for a while, however it has become clear for many different reasons we needed to give ourselves a name.

So after spending time thinking, praying and talking about what we’d want our name to communicate about us. We have come up with:

Church 123:Working title for a new church on Harold Hill

123 comes from Matthew 1v23

"The virgin will be with child and will give birth to a son, and they will call him Immanuel"—which means, "God with us."

123 therefore hints at the bible verse, but also that we are starting something simple, easy, down to earth.

The virgin- Mary was an unexpected humble and potentiality despised woman and yet God did something amazing with her. Harold Hill is a humble and often despised, it would be an unexpected area for God to do something amazing with, but we believe that God has been and is doing something amazing on Harold Hill.

The virgin will be with child . God does the amazing, miraculous and wonderful and as a church we want to see God doing the amazing, miraculous and wonderful and bring new life among those on Harold Hill.

Working title:One of our most important values it that local people have influence over the church, it’s name and structure. We are not here to impose but to work with, we not importing a style of church which was conceived in a different culture, we are growing a church in this culture. Whilst we have felt the need to name ourselves we are very keen that people understand that the name can be changed, in fact we hope that new local believers will change it.

Church

The word church is a loaded word in English culture, but we went for it for these reasons:

We want to be a church and are not far off being one.

We want to be part of something which redeems the word

People on Harold Hill seem very suspicious of new and fancy things, the word church we felt would give some reassurance that we were not some thing to be suspicious or afraid of.

Immanuel"—which means, "God with us."

The whole value of us living among people and the reality that Jesus mission style started by being among people is so important to us as a team, we believe that God is with those on Harold Hill, but we also want to demonstrate that by the way we are locally incarnated.

So it is not a usually name, but what we’ve found is that straight away it gets people talking and asking questions. On the last parenting course I told people what our name was and then spent 20mins in conversation about what it meant. It is a little strange but we hope that like all we do it will be a tool in sharing the good news and in speaking about what we are about.