Church of the Master Votes to Change Name

After months of consideration, the congregation of a Sylmar Lutheran church voted this week to change its name in a bid to attract new members.

The former Lutheran Church of the Master will now be known as Church of the Foothills, said the Rev. Sam Platts, pastor of the 200-member Protestant congregation.

“It’s still a Lutheran church and it always will be,” Platts said. “But we realized that if we want to do our job the best we can, we need to make people feel welcome. Our old name apparently did not make people from outside the church feel welcome.”

Platts said he first became interested in the possibility of changing the church’s name in January from a speaker at a pastor’s institute at the Rev. Robert Schuller’s Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove.

Congregants came up with 64 possible new names, some serious, like “Church of the Foothills” and the second-place finisher, “The Church of Hope and Joy,” and some not so serious, like “Please Come to Our Church” and “Sven’s Big Building,” an allusion to the Scandinavian background many Lutherans share.

Eventually the list was paired down to six finalists, including the original name, “Lutheran Church of the Master.”

“We field-tested the finalists,” said Platts, who sent congregants to rummage sales and a Boy Scout carwash to gauge public response to the possible new names.

Church of the Foothills came out on top during the field testing and then received almost two-thirds of the congregation’s vote Sunday, Platts said.

“We did this simply because we want to make our church more inclusive, we need to bring in people with different backgrounds,” Platts said.

“We’re going to make these beautiful hills an advertisement for our congregation.”