What's in a name?

Friday is on the horizon--newspaper ads have been published, I have boxes of coffe mugs in my hallway, our plan has been set--we are anxiously awaiting our opportunity to introduce our new community to Durango. The phone calls and emails are starting to come in...one problem, though...the phone calls and emails I'm receiving are not curious locals, but patrons of another church. Apparently, there is another Christ the King Church in Durango--a Lutheran church. They have been around for 42 years and have built a good reputation as a place of worship as well as making their facility available to the public. I noticed this church in the phone book a year ago and (perhaps naively) decided it would not be that big of a deal--since, we are part of an organization, we don't have a lot of choice in the name selection. If we were operating on our own, I would be more inclined to try and choose a different name for the sake of distinquishing oursleves, but the nature of our organization is that we are a campus (albeit several states away) of Christ the King Community Church in Washington.

The people I have talked to seem nice enough, but extremely concerned that our presence might be confusing to the people of Durango. My initial thoughts are these:

1. I'm pretty sure someone looking for a Lutheran church will find CTK Lutheran church easily in the phone book and be able to distinguish between it and CTK Community church.

2. Someone looking for a facility to rent called Christ the King will find the correct address since we will most likely never have a facility of our own and CTK Lutheran does.

3. I am confident that our basic mode of operation--worship, small groups, and service will not tarnish the reputation of any church--if anything it will enhance the standing of all churches in Durango to have a community of people pouring their lives into any cause which promotes and serves Durango.

4. Reversing roles in my head, if I were to notice a church start up with the name Christ the King I would, in fact, be interested to see that they were interested in "keeping the main the the main thing" in terms of their faith and mission--that settled, I would want to welcome and promote them as much as possible, not pressure them to change their name.

Something I may regret in this process: as naive as I am, I wonder if I still should have forseen this and contacted the pastor of the Lutheran church before hand to, at least, explain who we are and possibly forgoe some of this awkwardness. I plan to contact him now, anyway--I just hope it doesn't amount to too much too late in his/his congregation's eyes.

My worst nightmare is that this would become such an obstacle to our counterparts in Durango that a God-seeking and upstanding church becomes distracted from their mission (one we share, by the way) by the likes of us.

Time will tell. My goal at this point is to do whatever I can to guide this small community of believers in such a way so as to please and delight Christ the King--oh, and Christ the King Lutheran too.