It Was Only a Name Change, But.....

It really stirred up a lot of feelings in me. I found out the other day that my old student ministry changed their name. At first, I thought about how stupid that is. It bothers me when a church gets a new pastor to students and one of the first thing they do is change the name. I don't get this mind set. When you change senior pastor's they don't usually change the name of the church. But yet they somehow think that it is the thing to do with student ministries. Why do pastor to student's do this? Here is my theory. Mainly because they are so insecure and want to erase any memory of the former guy. They act like a dog peeing in a yard to mark off it's territory after another dog did the same thing. Now I want to add that I changed the name of the student ministry there when I came on board, but that was because the old name hadn't even been used for over a year. I did not do it to erase the other guy's name, in fact, I did my best to honor his name. I would not entertain people telling me stories about how bad he was or anything like that. And several times at Good Friday or Christmas Eve services, he would come back to visit and I would always try to be one of the first one's to go and greet him. But enough about that..... I think more pastor to students need to move past their big egos and get over themselves. It isn't about them anyway. It is about the students. And the name even though it really isn't much, has quite likely become a part of their identity. So to change the name doesn't make much sense to me, unless the name is really lame. But the more I thought about it, the happier I was. Why, you ask? Because now I have no ties or link to the student ministry there. It was like the final thing that needed to break for me to feel fully released from there. Now I am no longer worried that what I had built there was not being properly maintained, because I have no connection there anymore. While I don't like them changing the name, something inside of me is rejoicing about it.