You can’t give yourself a nickname. Or, to be more precise, you shouldn’t give yourself a nickname. You have to let it happen naturally. Of course, when you leave it up to others you then run the risk that you might get an unpleasant nickname. But do not fret—all of the best names start out as insults.
At least, this has often been the case historically. The label “Yankee” was originally meant by the British to make fun of Americans, but now it’s a (somewhat) beloved baseball team. Or consider Impressionism—coined by the art critic Louis Leroy to mock the work of Claude Monet—and Gothic—used during the Renaissance to call something barbaric—both now the accepted term for aesthetic styles. One of my favorite theological schools of thought, mentioned before on this blog, is Grammatical Thomism, which originally got its name from a scholarly critique of their project. And this phenomenon is even more common for religious traditions: the names for both the Quakers and the Shakers, for the Puritans, and later for the Methodists were all meant to be derogatory but were each ultimately adopted by those they intended to deride. It is the same for the “Campbellites” and all “Protestants,” and as most of us are familiar, it seems to be the case for Christians.
We learn in Acts 11 that the followers of Jesus were first called “Christians” in Antioch, suggesting the name was given to them by outsiders looking in. Later in the book, Herod Agrippa asks of Paul, “In a short time would you persuade me to be a Christian?”—and one can almost hear the irony and scorn in his tone. And even the term itself suggests derision, with the Greek suffix –ianos commonly used to apply to obsessive followers, perhaps of a political sort.
Such names, in linguistic terms, demonstrate exonyms (names given from outside) that eventually become endonym (names used by the group itself). A modern example would be “nerds,” once exclusively a term of insult, now it is used to self-identify by anyone not interested in college football. In the same way, an outsider might utter “Christian” with their nose held high, but this does not stop Christians from using that same term to name themselves.
These etymological shifts from exonym to endonym do not always occur because they require the one being so named to revel in their distinction, the source of their nickname. They have to be proud of the very thing they were being insulted for. But such were the early Christians: proud to obsessively follow Christ, to wear his name as a badge of honor, to be called by that beautiful name even unto death. It was not an insult to their ears, and that’s why it stuck.