Answer:
Thanks for the question. Yes, you have it right, it's actually a Blue Heron. It's part of our church logo. We've had a heron in our church logo since we planted our church in 1995. We selected the Heron as our "mascot" for a couple reasons. First, it's indigenous to the Allen Creek geographical area which is our mission field as a church. The second reason has to do with our passion for evangelism at AC3 and how we feel God's called us to do. Jesus called his disciples to be "fishers of men" and we love that the Blue Heron is known as an excellent and patient fisherman. At AC3 our passion is to reach deeply unchurched, skeptical and irreligious people with the gospel, and to do that, we've found we need to be real, loving and patient, like the Heron.
The reason we don't have a cross in our building is because we've tried to be very intentional about making our public space unchurchy. It goes back to what i said earlier about the people we are passionate to reach. We've crafted our weekend services specifically to be a safe place to invite our unchurched friends to. So we wanted the physical space to feel safe, like neutral territory for them and not completely foreign. It's hard for people who have never been in the shoes of a person who hasn't been to church in a while (or ever) to feel just how uncomfortable or overwhelming most church's sanctuary's can be. Imagine being invited to a Mosque by a Muslim friend and you'll get the idea. So we intentionally left out crosses, stained glass windows, and other architectural touches that say to insiders, "this is holy space" and to outsiders subtly, "you don't belong here: this is a strange place." Neither message should be encouraged.
Just so you know, we have in the past changed the logo on the stage to match the series we're in, so it's not always been the heron back there. In fact, rarely. I feel pretty strongly that we shouldn't put too strong an emphasis on any physical symbol of our faith. The cross has been an important one, but there have been others too (the early church had no crosses in their first buildings, but they did have fish). And of course the apostolic church didn't have buildings or crosses at all so we feel no biblical mandate about these things.
