What's In a Name? Trends in Non-Denominational Church Branding

And, I help you generate your own name for a church plant!

Way back in July of 2023, I wrote a post about a topic that has become evergreen for me - the rise of non-denominational Protestant Christianity. I began with this little anecdote,

A few months ago, my wife and I were driving into St. Louis and were about ten miles away from downtown in a suburb on the Illinois side of the river. We drove by this large commercial building next to the interstate that had a fairly nondescript sign with a single word on it, “Ascend.”

She looked at me and said, “Is that a church?” I honestly had no idea. So, she Googled it. Guess what Ascend is? It’s a marijuana dispensary. Illinois just legalized marijuana for recreational sale a few years ago and there are lots of new stores opening up all over the state. That’s the world we live in right now, not entirely sure if that new big warehouse by the highway is selling recreational drugs or preaching Jesus.

And, yes, I now know that John Crist has done a bit about this, but I can promise you that I had never even seen that video until someone pointed it out to me after the fact.

But, beyond all that - there's this weird phenomenon of new churches trying to be trendy. They seem to want a name that is vaguely spiritual, but extremely catchy. I think that the whole thing is just this odd little window into the evolution of the Seeker Sensitive movement. But, it sparked a bit of an idea for me - could I try to identify some trends into how these church plants are going about naming themselves?

So, here’s what I did - I grabbed a database of plants that are organized into what is called the Association of Related Churches (ARC). They are one of the most important and successful church planting networks in the United States. They plant about 35-40 churches a year and at the end of 2024 had helped 1,132 aspiring pastors get their start. So, I grabbed the names and locations of all their churches from their websites’ “Find a Church” directory.

Here’s a map of where they are located.

In total, I grabbed information from 1,244 churches in the database (some of them are just ARC-affiliated, not necessarily planted by ARC). This is a trend I’ve written about before but it looks like these church planters decide that God is leading them to establish a house of worship in parts of the country that are densely populated (and often growing rapidly). You can see a whole bunch of dots all over the coast of Florida and California.

What’s interesting about ARC is that it has churches in basically every region of the United States. There are a bunch in the South, of course. But there are lots in the Northeast and Midwest, too. The only place where I can say that ARC doesn’t exist in large numbers is the rural plains. The Dakotas and Wyoming aren’t teeming with church planting. I think planters know it’s always easier to grow a church when there are more people around.

Before I get to their names, I wanted to point out an interesting little finding that I stumbled upon when I was cleaning up the names and addresses database: some of them list their address at a location that is not a typical church building.