Today the Free Church of Scotland rolled out a rebranding of their mission work. When I heard the preview of this at their GA three weeks ago it reminded me of that old corporate and job-search advice

“Dress for the job you want, not the one you have.”

More on that in a minute. But first…

Welcome to Generation

This is the new name and logo for the Mission Board of the Free Church of Scotland. It includes branded printed material as well as their new website, generation-mission.org.

As I said, this was previewed at the 2018 General Assembly and the branding presentation can be viewed on the archived GA recordings for the Wednesday Morning session. (Begins at the 1:50:00 mark).

Overall, this represents a nice consistent branding effort for the mission outreach, home and world, for the Free Church. While yellow is not my favorite colour, the yellow/black pallet works surprisingly well. The four areas – Church Planting, Church Development, Church Equipping, and Global Mission – have their areas and presentations. Looks like some work could be done on the html header and metadata for the web site, but I am sure that will get caught at some point. In addition, there seems to be a minimum of linkage between the new branded web site and the existing Free Church site. I am curious to see how that develops.

Now, in the original GA presentation one thing caught my eye and gets back to the quote at the beginning. As they were describing the development process they gave examples of other logos that inspired them. Here is the screen capture of that point from the video:

To list the four examples given they are 20 Schemes, 9 Marks, Redeemer City to City, and Acts 29. If you are not familiar with them, they are all parachurch organizations. While I have no fundamental issues with them, it raises the question – for me at least – of what the goal is. As that advice says: “Dress for the job you want, not the one you have.” Is this opening the door to the Mission Board distancing itself from the Free Church in its branding and moving toward a more autonomous model?

To be clear, there was no hint of this in the discussion at GA – the intent was clearly to establish a brand that would help the Mission Board promote the work that it is doing. But when I saw the company it was looking to keep it raised personal red flags when there were all parachurch organizations and at least three of the four are usually viewed as part of what has come to be known in the States as the Evangelical Industrial Complex. (I know 20 Schemes as a church planting/revitalization effort in Scotland and one whose work I have come to respect. They are however associated with an American non-profit according to their about page.)

And as a historical note, my own view may hold a bit of caution because of a similar effort in the PC(USA) that about four years back became a bit of an issue. It should be noted that the church planting entity is still there and is still in the church  planting business.

So at this point, enjoy the brand and prayers and best wishes to the Mission Board in their work. I don’t know with any certainty whether separately branding an effort within a denomination is a beneficial way to go, so we look forward to seeing how this effort develops.