Last Sunday we thought about the power of names and the way that God renamed several key characters in the Bible to reflect something about their new identity. The names of those key figures – Abraham, Sarah, Israel, Peter – would always remind them of who they were.
Beyond the question of identity, our names are also deeply personal. Dale Carnegie famously said that “a person’s name is to that person the sweetest and most important sound in any language”. This week in our Exec meeting, we had a conversation about the importance of names in our church community. We recognised that even if we have been worshipping at WMC for many years, there are familiar faces among us whose names we have forgotten or have never known. It’s embarrassing to ask to be reminded of someone’s name, but it’s a worthwhile price to pay because until we know names, relationships can only exist at the most superficial level. So, because names matter, we’re going to make a point on Sundays of supplying name tags and speaking each others’ names, in the hope that more and more of us get to hear that “sweetest and most important sound”.
Beyond the question of identity, our names are also deeply personal. Dale Carnegie famously said that “a person’s name is to that person the sweetest and most important sound in any language”. This week in our Exec meeting, we had a conversation about the importance of names in our church community. We recognised that even if we have been worshipping at WMC for many years, there are familiar faces among us whose names we have forgotten or have never known. It’s embarrassing to ask to be reminded of someone’s name, but it’s a worthwhile price to pay because until we know names, relationships can only exist at the most superficial level. So, because names matter, we’re going to make a point on Sundays of supplying name tags and speaking each others’ names, in the hope that more and more of us get to hear that “sweetest and most important sound”.