Denominational 'Branding'

Pernell Goodyear askes an interesting question in his self-titled blog:

What are people's impressions and experiences with church/denomination identification/branding?

What has your experience been? Is it healthy and normal to need to broadcast this belonging in branding form, and should I just get over the way I feel, or what? These are not rhetorical questions. Please comment.

See full post here.

This is a question I have thought about for some time, so thought my response is worth re-posting here:

I am anti-branding. I've read several comments where your readers explain how knowing you are SA might affect them for or against. The bottom line is, the logo causes people to form pre-conceived ideas which may be completely different than what your group is about.

My emergent group went through something similar when we first became official. We wanted to call ourselves "Emerge Community", as we consider ourselves a community of believers and searchers rather than a church. It took a certain amount of explanation and convincing before we were allowed to drop "Church" from our title, but we were required to include our denimination name "Foursquare". In my mind, you may as well shout WE ARE A CHURCH to the skies. Having the denomination name brands us as a church as much as if we'd included 'church' in our title. And I believe it did affect who chose to visit us.I don't advocate abanding all ties with your denomination.

I just think that visitors need a chance to see who YOU are first, without preconceived ideas.