A marketing professor at the University of Illinois recently conducted an interesting experiment. He asked students to make a side-by-side taste comparison of two soft drinks — Coca-Cola, the world’s leading brand, and Sam’s Choice Cola, the inexpensive house brand sold at Wal-Mart stores. Each student was asked to taste both colas and indicate which tasted better.

The majority of participants stated that the Coke tasted better to them than the generic Sam’s Choice. Imagine the students’ shock when the professor revealed that the soda labeled “Coca-Cola” was, in fact, Sam’s Choice, poured from the same bottle as the alternative selection! Even though the two drinks given each taster were identical, most imagined that the sample labeled as Coke tasted superior to the product bearing the Wal-Mart brand.

Why would this happen? Call it “brand conditioning.” The Coca-Cola Company has invested billions of dollars in advertising over the past 117 years convincing the world that Coke is “the real thing,” as the commercials used to say. People have learned to associate the name Coca-Cola with quality soft drinks. It stands to reason that Coke must taste better than any other soda — would the Coca-Cola people lie to you? Therefore, given the choice between two colas, one with a Coke label and one from Wal-Mart, one expects the Coke sample to taste better...even if it doesn’t really taste any different than the Wal-Mart brand.

Brand conditioning is one reason we, as New Testament Christians, have a challenge in convincing people to embrace simple, unadorned, Bible-based Christianity. We have no brand name to sell. We are the “generic” faith, the “house brand” of religion. If someone asks you about your faith, and you reply, “I’m a Christian,” their next question will often be, “Yes, but what kind?”

The denominational churches have long conditioned people to think of religion in terms of brand names. Being “just a Christian” is like being “just a cola” — if you have no trademark name on your label, your faith can’t possibly be as good as one of the popular brands.

The existence of brands, however, necessitates differentiation. There’s no value in the Coca-Cola name if every other soda tastes exactly like Coke. In religion, differentiation leads to conflicting creeds — each church needs its own document (or set of documents) to explain why it is different (and, by implication, better) than other churches. So Roman Catholicism must have its catechism, Methodism its Discipline, the Baptist church its Manual. Here again, we have no such unique document. We have the Bible, and nothing else, to define our faith. We are, in the eyes of our religious neighbors, “generic,” “no name,” “off-brand.”

But so it was, in the beginning. Read the entire book of Acts, and you will find neither brand nor denomination of church. Read the apostolic letters, and you will not find Paul writing to one kind of church, Peter writing to another variety, and John to yet another. The first disciples “continued steadfastly in the apostles’ doctrine” (Acts 2:42), and were commanded to “speak the same thing,” have “no divisions” among them, and “be perfectly joined together in the same mind and in the same judgment” (1 Corinthians 1:10). They practiced no “brand” of faith, only “the faith which was once for all delivered to the saints” (Jude 3).

The world can keep its labels and creeds. We’ll remain content to wear no brand but Christ’s (Acts 4:12).