The church is not the Fount.

When Georgie and I were preparing to rename our church in 2023, she came to me with something she said had been sitting on her for weeks. It wasn’t a brainstorm list. It was a hymn.

Come thou fount of every blessing, tune my heart to sing thy grace.

Robert Robinson wrote those words in 1758 when he was twenty-two years old, two years after a conversion under George Whitefield. He would eventually walk away from faith, then return, then waver again. The hymn itself outlived his own doubts. That’s part of why I love it. The theology is steadier than the man who wrote it, which is exactly how it should be.

The conviction behind our name is simple and I want to say it plainly: the church is not the Fount. Jesus is. A church can be a place where people meet the Fount. A church can be shaped by the Fount. A church can sing about the Fount and preach about the Fount and point people toward the Fount. But a church is never the Fount.

That matters more than you might think. Because when a church forgets this , when the institution starts to believe that it is what people are coming for, or that its culture is what saves them, or that its pastor is the reason the lives are changing, something slow and quiet begins to die.

Ministry of any kind lives on borrowed water. The minute we forget that, we start trying to manufacture what was only ever meant to be received.

Every Sunday at FOUNT we sing songs that were not ours first. We read from a Book that was not ours first. We preach a Jesus who was not ours first. And if we ever start to act like we are the Fount, like people are here for our branding, our creativity, our pastors, our anything, then we have become exactly the kind of church we said we would never be.

So we keep the name in front of us. FOUNT. Not because the name is magic but because the name is a reminder. Every time I see it on a wall, every time I hear our people say it, every time a stranger asks what the name means, it does its small faithful work: it points past us to Him.

Streams of mercy, never ceasing, call for songs of loudest praise.

Not streams from us. Streams through us. That’s the whole thing.