For some time now I have been struggling with a desire to accurately portray the heart of New Creation visually. I have been stuck thinking about our logo. Stuck thinking of how it could be updated, or changed entirely. We budgeted for a logo redesign this year, but then it occurred to me that I wasn’t even sure what I want it to represent, let alone what anyone else at New Creation would want to represent. Sure, we have our vision and our mission statements, but those are more about what we are doing than who we are.

    Then I started thinking about how to figure this out, meetings, surveys, focus groups? Then, as so often the case, the Lord smacked me in the back of the head and commanded me to open my eyes and look at was right in front of me, something I see every day.

    You see, last week, a unique and interesting event took place in my virtual world. Rev. Jeremy Smith, who runs the Hacking Christianity blog, organized Pastor’s 24. This was a 24 hour event during which 72 pastors, of multiple denominations, used Twitter to document their day. The 72 pastors sent 1050 updates to Twitter throughout the day. One pastor summarized his day with this final post: 

108 miles traveled. 13 hrs away from home. 3 pastoral visits. numerous conversations. 1 committee meeting. that’s my wednesday #pastors24 | @mjmm

    Anyway, back to my story… Rev. Jeremy decided to pore through all the updates and pull out a variety of statistics to share. Which he did on his blog. One of the tools he used was a Word Cloud. A Word Cloud is a visual depiction of user-generated words or simply the word content of a web site, typically used to describe the content of web sites. Often, further visual properties are manipulated, such as the font color, intensity, or weight to indicate word frequency. Larger, bolder words stand out to indicate the words that are used most frequently.

    I see word clouds multiple times a day, but never thought to use one in this way. Rev. Jeremy used one to emphasize how these pastors spent their day. Looking at this, BAM it hit me. What a great way to visually express who we are at New Creation. I quickly sent out an e-mail to our members asking each to send me ten words to describe New Creation.  As each response came, I got more excited as I saw the trends. Responses came in from all ages, including our confirmation kids.

    I added “New Creation” to every response, because I wanted it to visually stand out. I also standardized a few words, such as Spiritual, Full-of-Spirit, and Spirituality; to better represent the frequency of the thought. Lastly, a few words, that were only used once, were dropped.

    So, how do we describe ourselves? Musical, Fun, Friendly, Welcoming, Rockin, Supportive, Community, Loving, Progressive, Reconciling, Accepting, Family, Different… I have added these results to our website. I also printed out an 11x14 print, with hope that it can be displayed in the church.

    What did I learn? We all have a similar, but slightly different, view of New Creation. I believe that is one of the things that make New Creation unique. This reaffirmed that our church looks a little different to each of us. Our church fills a different role for each of us. But we all share some common bonds, and we are accepting of our differences. As I said before, this is the primary reason that I am at New Creation.

    Yes, we still should do something with our logo and this may take us one step further along in the process. For now, let us rejoice in our commonalities and revel in our differences!