I was going to post on the outcomes for the fourth and final strand of the new Lifespan Faith Development curriculum series today, but I left my handout at the office and Mondays are a work-at-home day. So instead I wanted to follow up on something I blogged about a couple of months ago–the role logos play in projecting an image of your congregation to the wider community. What brought this to mind was an article in today’s New York Times called “Blackwater Softens Its Logo From Macho to Corporate,” which is all about how “the company’s roughneck logo — a bear’s paw print in a red crosshairs, under lettering that looks to have been ripped from a fifth of Jim Beam — has undergone a publicity-conscious, corporate scrubbing.”
The reason this caught my eye is because Blackwater has felt the need to soften it’s image, but there’s at least one church planter (blogging pastor Ben Arment) who feels that congregations should consider using more masculine logos in order to attract more men (and he claims that it may actually be working). Now I don’t know if UU congregations need logos with a “beefy look” in order to attract more men, but it does make me wonder if logos that are too new age-y may be keeping men away.
Here are the logos in question: Blackwater’s new “softer” logo,
and Reston Community Church’s “beefy” logo,
BTW, Ben Arment’s evangelical church plant in Reston, Virginia is not the first congregation there to use the name “community church.” According to Arment, a Unitarian Universalist congregation in Reston went by used that name some years ago. “Imagine the confusion it must have caused for visitors stopping in,” Arment says, “expecting a church that actually had beliefs.”
Phil's Little Blog on the Prairie 
Leave a comment
Comments feed for this article