Blog

This weekend, Church Juice turned one.  In some ways, it may not seem like all that big of a milestone, but when I really stop and look at where we’ve been, I’m sort of amazed where we are actually at today.  One of our cores here at Church Juice is to be an educational resource.  Whether it’s experiences from a project we consulted on or the writing of resources, we want to make everything a learning experience to help the next person that comes to our site.  So I thought I’d spend some time over the next several days sharing the process we went through in forming Church Juice into what it is today.

The idea that Church Juice has been around for just a year is a little bit deceiving.  This project actually started as a concept back in 2006 under the name Congregational Media Outreach Project.  Fancy right?  As some of you may know, we’re partially funded by a denomination and work under the larger umbrella of a ten language international media ministry. Our goal was to find a way to give back to the churches that help fund us.  And since our expertise was in using all forms of media (radio, TV, internet, cell phones, print, etc.) we were going to provide churches help in using media to reach their communities.

The concept started as building a library of felt need campaigns that a church could plug their information into and use as a way to advertise.  For example, we’d take a topic like money or addiction and create a TV commercial, radio spot and all sorts of graphics for billboards, postcards, website splash pages, etc. 

But before we started moving forward, we wanted to make sure what we were doing would actually be useful for churches.  We organized a day and a half summit with a wide group of key people that would be interested in a church media outreach project.  We included media savvy pastors, non-media savvy pastors, public relations people and church branding professionals.  As we worked through several conversations and workshops, we realized what we were planning to do ranked dead last in what churches wanted.  Wow.  Aren’t we glad we did some research before launching into this? 

From there, we started to reshape the project checking back with folks who were involved in the summit.  Then we worked through a couple of staff ideations where members of our team spent time talking though the core values of this project and what it was going to look like. 

Through that process, we ended up with the ministry that is Church Juice, although at that point, it still didn’t have a name.  We’ll take a look at the naming process in our next post.

Other posts in this series:

Brand Expression: Picking A Name

Finding the Right Church Juice Logo

The Church Juice Logo in Technicolor

Church Juice Visual Identity