“We’re giving away just about our entire church,” says Pat Hall, pastor of the congregation formerly known as Frontline Covenant Church.
The congregation had been leasing a 10,000-square-foot building with a contemporary, first-class new facility within an industrial commercial property. As it moves to the school and meets in its well-equipped, two-year-old auditorium, the church no longer needed much of what it owned.
So the church gave away 350 seats to the Northwest Conference of the Evangelical Covenant Church. It donated its sound system to a new church plant, and is giving away its piano. “Why would we want to store it when someone else could use it?”
The move and new name are part of the congregation’s ongoing transition that began several years ago. The church was welcomed as a transfer into the denomination at June’s Annual Meeting in Portland, Oregon.
The church, which started in 1994 as a non-denominational congregation, began its move to the Covenant in 2005 after Hall, a former Lutheran (ELCA) minister, was called to be its pastor. They already had begun considering affiliating with a denomination. Hall was coaching hockey at Minnehaha and the connection with the Covenant grew. Hall, who also serves as a chaplain with an area law enforcement agency, recently received commendations for his work after the collapse of the I-35 Bridge.
The name change process also was helped along by what Hall humorously describes as “a childish act” on his part. The congregation was contemplating a “rebranding” process and wanted to do extensive marketing research. But that required a lot of money.
Hall thought he had a solution. His brother’s company specializes in helping corporations with marketing and branding. Hall assumed his brother would volunteer his company’s time to help the church. However, his brother turned him down, saying the job was too big.
“I told him, ‘I going to tell mom you won’t help me,’ ” Hall recalls. His brother didn’t believe that Hall, 53 years old at the time, would resort to such a juvenile tactic. “He called me back and said, ‘I just got a call from mom.’ ” The firm donated the time, Hall says, laughing.
Hall, who is now completing doctoral degree work in branding churches for evangelism, says the new name communicates the essence of the congregation. All of the church’s ministry will be influenced by its belief that “True light fires your life’s journey.”
