From Sampler to Sower

Our youth ministry in Middletown is called Water’s Edge.  We’ve built on that name for many of the other things we do.  Our Junior High service is the Shore.  Our youth center is the Cove.  Our series of discipleship resources to help students go deeper with their faith is Submerge.  But where did the name Water’s Edge come from?

Our Ministry Leadership Council did not just pull that name out of the air.  It was the result of a very intentional process that sought to understand first what we were hoping to communicate before considering any possibilities.  Here’s how we came to the decision:

When I first moved to Middletown, we spent the first three months of our ministry just getting things ready.  We didn’t immediately launch youth services.  Instead we sought to encourage the ministries for teens that were already happening (Sunday School) and worked on building relationships with future leaders.  The two groups that I most needed to develop before we were ready to launch were a praise band and a Ministry Leadership council.

I began meeting with a group of student leaders to lay out the vision for our youth ministry.  We spent those three months teaching them about our philosophy of ministry and working through the decisions that would have to be made before we could launch: things like when would we meet, where, and of course, “What will we call this thing?”

Rather than taking suggestions for names and voting on a favorite, we began by brainstorming what we wanted the key characteristics of our youth program to be. If we were going to choose a name that communicated our identity, we needed to know what that identity was.

Some of the images we wanted to evoke were:

• Friendships- Whatever we called it, we wanted it to sound like something you would bring a friend to, or a place where you would go to meet friends.
• Fun- We wanted the name to suggest a place where you could get active and have fun.  We wanted the name to evoke images of laughter and play.
• Adventure- Ideally the name would evoke images not only of fun, but of excitement and possibility.
• Refreshment- We knew that a youth service should be a place were students can get refreshed and refueled in the middle of the week.
• Danger- Not so much danger that you might get hurt, but rather you never know what’s going to happen.  It goes along with adventure.  The image here was the description of the road in Fellowship of the Ring: “It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out of your door,” he used to say. “You step into the Road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there is no telling where you might be swept off to.”
• Beginnings- We wanted to stress that this service was just the beginning of something far greater and far bigger than any one of us.

Once we had agreed on the images we wanted our name to evoke, we started taking suggestions.  The one requirement for every name was that the person making the suggestion had to explain which of the images that name evoked.

It’s been too long ago now to remember all the names we discussed.  My personal favorite going into the meeting was Agape (the New Testament word for holy love), probably because that was the name I had used for our ministry in Illinois.  Looking back though, it didn’t fit our images very well.

Another I remember was High Octane. It suggested fun and excitement, and also refreshment/refueling.  However, looking back I’m glad it didn’t win out, especially in the age of high gas prices and the negative connotations associated with fossil fuels.

We finally settled on Water’s Edge because it fit not a few, but every one of the images we wanted to communicate.  It’s proven to be a great name, largely because it reflects what we do.  It was developed from an understanding of who we wanted to be.

In my experience, names tend to fit. Sometimes they fit because we become what we call ourselves.  A name makes suggestions about what we should expect, and those subtle expectations, communicated every time a name is spoken, shape us.

It seems far better to fix firmly in mind what direction you want to move and choose a name that reinforces that vision, rather than choose one that will constantly pull you in a different direction.