I was listening to the news last week and a statement made caught my attention. They were reporting that Campus Crusade for Christ was taking Christ out of their name because they thought it was too offensive. Being skeptical I decided to look up the truth of this claim myself and found that they are changing their name to Cru and were in fact taking Christ as well as Crusade out of their name, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/07/20/campus-crusade-for-christ_n_905121.html.
If you read some of the comments you see that some think this is a way to conciel who the group is in order to talk to people that normally would not want to talk to them if they knew who they were. I think this may be a good argument, in particular because they already had Christ in their name. Should we hide who we are in order to reach more people, as this seems to be overtly concealing.
In business we don’t hide what our product is in order to sell more of them. We brag about the product and tell everyone how it will be to their advantage in purchasing it from us. Companies spend thousands if not millions to tell people what their product is. This seems to be the opposite, because they are taking the word “Christ” out so people will not know up front. They believe this will allow them to reach more people, but will it. And what will it do their image in the long term?
This seems a lot like the Porn outreach, but on a larger scale. At one point on the campus I live by there were all these signs that had “Porn” written on them, and then a place, date and time of the event. No other information was given. People showed up to this event, many thinking they were going to see Porn, or at least hear about it and found themselves at an outreach event against pornography. Businesses in the community were upset because they did not know what was going on, as their sidewalks were covered with the world “Porn” plus the location and time, but nothing stating anything else. Had they told the owners or put more info then the owners I talked with would have kept it out there instead of washing it off because it was offensive.
I think the same can be said when we hide Christ from what we are doing and not making it known why we do what we do. The Bible seems to have the exact opposite approach in letting people know they were Christians. They told everyone why they were doing what they were doing and did not try to hide it in order to talk to more people. They were bold with the name of Christ in a time that it was dangerous to be a Christian. It is not dangerous to be a Christian in America, and hiding the name because it might offend seems a little bit of a stretch.
Maybe I am wrong, and the name change is not any big deal, though my issue is not the name change, but the reason given for taking the name of Christ out of it.
