What does your community need to do to become more guest-friendly?
How do you make guests feel welcome?
Hiring Smiling Faces—This is what the sign in front of Wendy’s says when they are trying to hire new workers and this is what your entire congregation needs to be able to do not just on Sunday but 24/7. Sure we all have problems at times, but we need to find ways to get past those problems and let Jesus’ light shine through us all of the time.
Helpful-friendly people—You need to train all of your congregation members and regular attendees to be Helpful-Friendly People not just when they are on duty at the Welcome Table, as an usher, at the Book Table or wherever but all of the time. If they encounter someone who is looking for something around the church at anytime they need to be ready to help them.
Sanctuary—Just like your parking lot when your sanctuary is 80% full you will begin losing your regular attendees and your potential guests. Likewise when your sanctuary looks empty your guests won’t return the next week so block off a number of empty pews in the back and move everyone down front.
The following are stations where you need to have people from one half hour before the service to one half hour after the service.
1.Greeters at the front door
2. Guest or Welcome table
A. People to answer questions about your church
B. People to take visitors to
- Classes
- Sanctuary
- Restrooms
C. A visitor’s pack that would include the following:
- Campus map (if needed)
- Newsletters –past and present
- Something that tells who you are
- Your staff –a complete listing of your professional and support staff
- Upcoming events
- A summary of all ministries with leaders name and contact information, the dates and location where they meet
- Information on discipleship classes and recreation opportunities
- These should be in a format that they can take home.
3. Greeters at the sanctuary doors with Worship Folders = Bulletin
A. What do you include in your Worship Folder?
- Service order if you have one
- Announcements for the week and at least one month ahead
- At the least a weekly calendar
- Church address, phone number, general church email address and web site address
- Names, phone numbers and email addresses of all professional staff people. You can include all staff people if you wish.
4. Ushers in sanctuary
- Help people find a seat even if you are not full
- Take offering – at least one in every aisle
- Leave at least one usher in the Narthex until 20 minutes after the service begins for late comers and to answer questions.
Other areas to be covered
5. Worship Service
- Greet the congregation with excitement and energy at the very beginning
- Give announcements at least ten minutes into the service so you are sure that the entire congregation is in the sanctuary. Marketing tells us that we have to put something in front of the people at least 6 or 7 times before they remember it. Don’t do the announcements at the beginning because not all of your people are in the sanctuary yet.
- A joyful service
- Include laughter
- Full of praise and worship-the entire service from prelude to postlude should be praise and worship even the announcements
- Send them home ready to minister to their neighbors and co-workers
- Have trained counselors stationed in the sanctuary to talk to people in need for both of spiritual help and other needs
- Not necessarily a contemporary service but a contemporary church
- Trained counselors stationed around the sanctuary at the end of the service to speak with people who want to turn their life over to Christ
- Greeters at your sanctuary doors as people leave
- Greeters at your outside doors as people leave
- Parking lot attendants as people leave
6. But isn’t this overkill if we have a small church?
Your one and only purpose as a church is to spread the Good News and to grow in numbers of believers so it doesn’t matter how big your church is right now. If you are a small church and continue to think small you are not doing what the Lord commands so you better get in gear and do what He expects of you.
In his book Guerrilla Marketing Jay Conrad Levinson says; “See marketing as a circle that starts with your idea for general revenue and completes itself when you have the blessed patronage of repeat and referral business. If your marketing is not a circle, it’s a straight line that leads to the bankruptcy courts.” (Page 7, ©1993, Houghton Mifflin Company)
7. The need for change
Out of the 93 churches that I have visited there have only been fifteen who were not in dire need of change. Regretfully, most of those churches that need to change would say that they were the friendliest and most dynamic churches in town. Making a decision to change is very difficult, but vitally important, because if there is no change then there is probably no reason to keep the doors open, and that is not what God wants for His church. Do some soul searching and take a Church Health Survey or a Complete Ministry Audit, see where your church is and begin the process of change if it is needed.
8. Questions you need to ask yourself before you begin any kind of change
- Do you have the desire to change?
- Are you willing to learn?
- Can you make sound decisions concerning that change?
- Can you take the proper action to effect the change?
- Are you ready to fight the sometimes long term fight that it might take to make a change?
9. Training
This is the most important part of the change—the training. It’s important that you make this training available to all of the people in your congregation not just a privileged few. Granted many of the people will get this training through osmosis because they will experience the mood of the majority and either jump on board or leave. If they leave don’t feel like you have been unsuccessful, there are always some who you will lose just keep moving forward with the majority. In fact you may even have to ask some people who won’t get on board to leave. This is not easy but it is sometimes a must.
10. What do we do now?
Begin to grow the church that God wants you to be.
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© 2006, Ken Johnson, President and CEO of The Ken Johnson Group, LLC. To contact Ken, or for permission to reprint this article, send an e-mail to: ken@thekenjohnsongroup.com |
