A Message about the Brand Refresh from Stadia’s President Greg Nettle
Press Release – Stadia Announces Brand Refresh
The church planting organization Stadia announced today that it has completed a brand refresh. “We haven’t had a major brand refresh in over ten years,” said Matt Murphy, Stadia’s Vice President of Mission Support. “We want to stay relevant to the next generation of leaders, investors, and partners so that we can work together to start thousands of new churches in the coming years.”
Stadia began in 2003 as a partnership between the Northern California Evangelistic Association and CDF Capital. Since then, Stadia has helped to start over 2000 churches around the world. While Stadia’s name and services remain the same, the rebrand includes a new, journey-inspired logo and wordmark, a newly redesigned website with a shorter address (stadia.org), and shortened staff e-mail addresses.
“Our logo has changed, but our commitment to the mission of helping people start thriving, growing, multiplying churches is more important than ever as we begin this new chapter in Stadia’s history, where, by God’s grace, we will help you start 20,000 new churches in the next 10 years,” said Greg Nettle, President of Stadia. “We won’t stop until every child has a church.”
The word “stadia” comes from a unit of measure found in Scripture at pivotal moments where followers of Jesus were challenged to step out or persevere in their faith (Luke 24:13, Matthew 14:24-32, alluded to in Heb. 12:1-3) and to describe the heavenly city filled with every “tribe, tongue, and nation” (Revelation 7:9, 21:16).
Visit https://stadia.org for more information on Stadia’s rebrand, and to explore the new website.
Stadia is a church planting organization that provides comprehensive, end-to-end church start-up services for any church model, serving and learning from a diverse and global group of new-church leaders, multiplication partners, and investors on their journey to start thriving, growing, multiplying churches for the next generation.
For more about the inspiration behind Stadia’s new brand, check out this brand identity video:
FAQ for Stadia Rebrand
Q: Is there meaning behind the new logo and wordmark design?
A: The logo draws inspiration from “switchbacks.” In hiking, switchbacks are designed so elevation changes occur over longer sections and guide people to keep pace on their upward journey. They help reduce hazards and allow people to adapt better through elevation and pressure changes. Just like switchbacks, Stadia is designed to guide new-church leaders through the difficult but beautiful terrain of launching and leading new churches that thrive, grow, and multiply for the next generation.
Q: The new logo does not make use of specific planting or organic multiplication imagery (leaves, trees, etc.). How will you represent your commitment to church planting and church multiplication?
A: Church planting and multiplication remain vitally important to Stadia. We want to help start 20,000 churches in the next ten years! The goal of the journey we take new-church leaders, investors, and partners on is thriving, growing, and multiplying churches. The switchback-inspired logo is distinctive among similar organizations and can be used to express multiplication through the creative use of the logo in a superscript, exponent-style positioning in some of our marketing and promotional materials. Additionally, while we use the language of church planting with those who are already familiar with it, we find the language of “starting new churches” is clearer, and a more direct way of talking about church planting to many audiences. The phrase “starting a new church” has a consistently higher search volume on Google than “church planting” also.
Q: Why change the logo now?
A: Stadia has been through two major brand changes in our 20-year history, in 2003 and 2011. Marketing experts say that any brand should evaluate its positioning every few years to make sure they’re still relevant to and reaching its target audience. We want to reach more potential new-church leaders than ever before. 200 new churches were started in the first ten years of Stadia’s existence, and 2000 were started in the last ten years. Interestingly, brand refreshes preceded and perhaps helped pave the way for what took place in our organization to reach these previous milestones. We believe the current brand refresh (and more importantly the strategy behind it) is a small part of what—by God’s grace and with the help of many new-church leaders, investors, and partners—will help us start 20,000 churches in the next 10 years.
Q: How will this change impact the partners, investors, and new-church leaders connected with Stadia?
A: Our services will remain unchanged by the brand refresh. You will begin to see Stadia’s “fresh look” on all our print and digital resources beginning in late summer 2023. Our new, shorter web address should make it easier to connect with us and share our resources (stadia.org). Our new, shorter email addresses should make it easier to communicate with us (and our old e-mail address will continue to work in perpetuity so we don’t miss any e-mails from those who might have the old addresses still). The new addresses will be F[email protected] (for example: [email protected]).