I want to give you 5 areas to consider improving your church welcome for your first time visitors when the come this Christmas Season.

1.  Train Greeters

Greeters can provide a warm handshake, helpful information and walk a guest to classes or the sanctuary if needed.

Greeting is more than just a hello.  It is a first impression.

I’ve got some free church greeter training videos here.

Or, purchase this DVD or Download video done in September 2011 to train greeters as a refresher.

Why is this important? Read these tweets and you get the idea.

Greeter at church- “How’s college? Have they kicked you out yet?” Not sure what this says about me.  –Twitter User

The greeter at church always flirts with me………uncomfortable!! — Twitter User

Way to go folks. Brought a visitor to church. Overheard “well that ain’t no way to dress for church.” — Twitter User

2. Cast a Hospitality Vision

Being friendly to your church visitor means that the church family is listening, inviting, encouraging, and caring.

Help your church get that vision for hospitality by casting it  when you can in sermons, meetings, and Sunday school classes. (Audio download from the store).

Church Visitors should be greeted by someone around them, not just the greeter at the door.

Particularly the lonely ones who may be away from family this time of year.

3. Church Visitors Welcome Packet.

Prepare Welcome Packets for your guest.

Read How to Prepare a welcome packet, perpetually one of the 10 ten articles on this website each year.

Include current information on upcoming programs and an invitation to meet with the pastor.

4.  Have a reception after the service.

Have a coffee/snack reception after the service.

This allows time for

• conversations with your church visitors to occur,
• for prayer to happen, and
• for your guests to meet with the pastors.

Beverages:

Make the coffee fresh and of appropriate strength. It shouldn’t be reheated from last night’s fellowship event nor should it be so weak as to taste like colored water.

While it doesn’t take a lot of skill to make coffee, making it right is the challenge.  Coffee drinkers know a good cup of coffee, and a bad cup will leave a bad taste.

Don’t forget to make enough – sometimes the pot gets drained before visitors have had a chance to get to the urn.

Offer alternatives such as teas, juice, ice cold water. If you choose to use bottled water, offer a recycle container for empty bottles.

Food:

Whatever snack items are offered, make sure they are fresh.

Stale sweets, or frozen items that had been thawed simply taste cheap and do not make a great first impression.

Consider common food allergies and either avoid those (like nuts) or provide an appropriate sign.

In our health conscious time, provide healthy options for those that don’t want sugary cookies or sticky sweets.

5.  Post visit Welcome Letter

Assuming you got church visitor contact information during the worship service, you’ll want to send them a nice follow up letter.

Be sure to include an invitation to return to the next worship service, as well as some upcoming event or service.

Don’t bother with “we are here to serve you, if you need anything.”

Instead, invite them to join you on a mission or upcoming event.

For example, “We believe in serving our neighborhood and being the best church for the community.  This month on [date] we’re going to serve the homeless and invite you to join us on that mission.”

Next steps

What are some areas that you would add?

Please share them in the comments below.

• Some are out of town guests.
• Other church visitors seek out the Christmas traditions of their youth.
• Others are awakening to their spiritual thirst.

Churches have special activities that are geared at increasing the number of personal invitations that members give.

While your attendance may swell at Christmas time, the critical question is

• How can you get your church visitors to come back after visiting your church this Christmas season?

Here are four factors to keep in mind.

1. A excellent and meaningful Christmas worship experience.

Make sure all your Christmas season events and worship services are done with excellence and quality.

Don’t let sloppiness or a lacksidasical attitude hinder your visitors experience of the Christmas season.

Think about your worship experiences and ask “Is this helping our visitors and members experience God and hear God’s truth?”

If a visitor doesn’t have a sense of encountering God during their visit, it’s highly unlikely they will return.  Instead, they’ll simply wonder “What’s the point of that?”

2.  Well done hospitality that reflects Christmas cheer.

Remove the unnecessary barriers to a return visit.

• Make sure your greeters are smiling at Christmas.   Read 10 Tips for Greeters.
• Make sure your facility is cleaned up and well decorated.
• Make sure your processes of getting from parking lot to pew are frictionless.
• Make sure your bulletins are easy to follow.

And most of all, make sure your members people say hello to the visitors.

There is lots of other information on this website about church hospitality.

Create the best experience possible at Christmas.

You can’t make a long term influence for Christ on a church visitor if they don’t come back to your church.

3.  Use the Advent time build momentum for your January sermon series.

The four weeks of advent is also a great time to start promoting your post Christmas sermon series.

Pick a topic that is relevant to life.

Do a six week  sermon series connected with the launch of new small groups.

These are great avenues to invite people back to church after the Christmas season is over.

Small groups allow for relationships to form, which increases the possibility your visitor will become a regular attender.

4.  Get visitor contact information.

There are many ways to get contact information.

I recommend the use of contact cards.   (Read and listen: How to Get Church Visitor Contact Information).  In our congregation, we are small enough to recognize first time vistiors. We hand them first time visitor cards.

Drop a note or Christmas card in the mail.

Invite them to other Christmas specials.  Remind your visitors they can bring a friend.

Also, use the card to remind your church visitors of the upcoming January series.

Even drop a little gift in the mail like a $5 gift card or gas card.

Some churches still make a personal visit within 24-48 hours.

Find ways to show honor to your visitor and invite them to return for January’s sermon series.

You can’t follow up if you don’t get any contact information.

Let me ask you this?

What specifically are you doing to be intentional about inviting your church visitors to return after Christmas?

Please share in the comments below.

I was the first time visitor to that store and felt completely lost and out of place.

What words might you accidentally use to make your first time church visitor feel clueless or ignorant?

What words does “everybody” know that  might not make any sense to a first time visitor?

• Kings Club
• Awanas
• Prime Time
• Eagles Group
• The Beverly Room.
• Narthex
• Sexton
• Supralapsarian
• Ontological

Our analysis of several churches showed that the “friendship” factor was low and was costing them the retention and assimilation of first time guests who were passing through their churches without a second visit.

I used your book to teach these churches how to organize and train a greeter team.

The information was well received. We will be doing a further analysis of these five churches by sending a “test” guest to each church to see if they have processed the material adequately.

Thanks for contributing excellent material for us to use in our training of these five Baptist churches.

~Mark Langley

MTSBC Church Strengthening Group

Purchase your ebook copy here:  How to Welcome Church Visitors

Is your church friendly?

Most church members, of any church, would answer that question, “Yes, we’re friendly!”.

But is that the answer that your church visitors would give?

Perceptions matter, and friendliness is in the eye of beholder.  Church Visitors come and go to the church and few of your church visitors stick around.

Perhaps the most painful words a pastor hears in this area is when a church visitor says to him or her after several weeks:

“I’ve been here for 6 weeks and still no one has said a word of hello to us.”

How can we miss this?

We have forgotten to think like a church visitor.

Put ourselves in their shoes.

Leviticus 19:33-34 says,

“When an alien lives with you in your hand, do not mistreat him.  The alien living with you must be treated as one of your native born.

Love him as yourself for you were aliens in Egypt.  I’m the Lord your God.”

The Israelite was not to oppress the alien in their midst because they knew how it felt to be an alien in the midst of another social group.  They could think and feel like the alien in their midst.  They could empathize.

You were the church visitor once.

Think about your volunteers.

Think about yourself.

The fact is you were once a first-time church visitor.  You were once a first-time visitor to this congregation or the congregation where you are at.

You were the alien once.  They can identify what it was like to be the church visitor for the very first time.

Some people may have been going to church before they were ever born.  They started growing in their mother’s womb and started going to church.  They were born into a church, and maybe they’ve never had an experience of being a first-time church visitor in that congregation.

But most of us we were a church visitor once.

Action Steps:

Do a Bible study of these verses with your church welcome or hospitality ministry team to help people think through their experience and their emotions as a first-time church visitor.

Help them develop empathy.

If you can’t remember what it was like to visit your congregation for the very first time, encourage your team to

• go as an individual
• to a church down the street
• that they have never been to before
• outside of their own tradition.

For example, if you’ve grown up in the Presbyterian Church and you’ve been in the Presbyterian Church for a long time, go to an Assembly of God on a Sunday.

Or visit the Pentecostal Tabernacle down the street.

Or visit a Baptist congregation if you’ve grown up in a Presbyterian system.

The idea is to mix it up and get outside of your comfort zone.

As  you experience being the alien in their midst, pay attention to your feelings, pay attention to your anxieties, pay attention to these things.

Noticing these things will help you develop an empathy for the visitor.

As you develop that empathy, your response to the church visitor who comes to your church will be more spontaneous and generous.

Informal but intentional

I recently spoke with a pastor of a medium size church of 300.

He has often heard from people after 6-10 weeks this statement that broke his heart: “I have been here x number of weeks and no one has said hello.”

(After a recent workshop on hospitality, one couple said “We’ve been in this church for 6 months and no one has noticed us.”)

Recently, this pastor took a sabbatical and visited other churches outside of his tradition.

He was the first time church visitor.

The experience of visiting congregations opened his eyes to the power of hospitality ministries in helping a church visitor feel welcome.  He summed up the best experience as “Informal but intentional.”

When he returned from sabbatical, he wants to cast the vision for hospitality ministry so that congregations members can see the power of such a ministry.

His experience opened his eyes.

Make the same visit and your team will be much richer for it.

Free video training (through Jan 25, 2011)

I’ve got an upcoming free 4 part video series on Growing Your Hospitality that I will be sharing, as well as introducing the course I’m offering.

To get on the early bird list for when the videos start on Jan 11, go to www.ChurchHospitalityTraining.com.

They will only be up until January 25.

When the service was over she came up to the pastor and I (I was the guest preacher, and pastor is to my right).

She began to talk with us.

She had been walking by the church and heard the noise and wandered in.

During the conversation, she expressed her concern about the health of the child in her arms.  Being of little means, she could not easily go to a doctor’s office, nor buy expensive medicine.

We offered to pray with her, that God would bring healing to her child, and asked her permission to pray with her right there.

She gave us permission and we had the opportunity to pray with her.

As I’ve not been back to that church, I do not know what came of that, nor do I know how God worked in that situation.

Listen for the Opportunity

Praying with your first time church visitors can give you opportunity to have follow up conversations about God’s work.

In my training for church greeters, we kick around the topic of training church greeters to look for appropriate moments to pray WITH and FOR church visitors.

If we attentively listen to the church visitor in our conversations, we might often hear them express something that is worrying them.

That can become a point of prayer with the church visitor before their departure.

That is the first step: Listen for the need in conversation.

Example of Praying with a Church Visitor

We had a church visitor who was an immigrant in our country on a Student Visa.  She was not yet a Christian, and had been invited to our international church.

As is my custom, I take the initiative to engage people in conversation.  As we talked, this church visitor expressed a concern over the status of her visa.  It was a big worry.

I offered to pray with her about this situation and the desired outcome.

“I know that God cares about your need.  Can we seek God together in prayer for His will to be done in this situation?”

I asked permission of her to pray with her at that moment.

“Would you be comfortable if I prayed with you right now for this situation?”

She allowed me to pray with her before she left.

The following week, she returned to our church.  God had answered her prayer.

Now she was more spiritually open to learning about following Jesus.  God gave her grace of a favorable answer as part of His work in drawing this student to Himself.

How not to be rude in Praying with a Church Visitor . . .

You can’t assume the stranger will be comfortable with you praying for them in public.

You can’t assume that the church visitor would even want you to pray for them.

Simply launching out with “Let’s pray about it right now” and proceeding to do so can be rude and embarrassing to your church visitor.

The key is asking permission to pray for them and with them.

In the example above, I asked permission of the church visitor in a two step process.

• Can we pray about this?
• Can we pray about this now?

I phrased it a little differently, but it is asking permission and giving room for people to say no.

One time, I asked permission and the person said no.  I respected that boundary (read Take a Risk, Offer to Pray).

Another time, we were in the cafeteria and I asked permission to pray.  The response was no.  Rather, the person wanted to pray alone that night over the situation we talked about.  He wasn’t comfortable with an public prayer in an open space.

You’ve got to be sensitive to the comfort level and boundaries of the person.

Permission is the foundational key to not being rude.

7 Tips to Praying for a Church Visitor

Here are 7 more tips to praying for a church visitor without being embarrassing or rude.  Notice, this starts after you have been given permission.

The following is taken Organic Outreach for Ordinary People: Sharing Good News Naturally (p. 114).

If you ask for permission to pray with an unbelieving family member or friend and they say yes, pause right then to offer up a simple prayer. Here are seven simple suggestions:

1. Keep your prayer brief. In most cases less than a minute is wise.
2. Use common language. Don’t make your prayer flowery and don’t use the King’s English. Let your words of prayer be conversational and natural.
3. Extend a hand if it is appropriate. If you feel it would be taken the right way, take the person’s hand or place your hand on their shoulder. There is power in touch.
4. Pray for the person’s specific need or joy. Focus your prayer on what they shared with you and don’t wander to other topics. Keep it simple; don’t turn your prayer into a chance to preach a sermon.
5. Pray in the name of Jesus. There is power in Jesus’ name. God already knows and cares about the person you are praying for. Make sure they know to whom you are praying and who to thank if the prayer is answered.
6. Check in to see how things are going. After a week or two, check in and see if the need has been met or if the joy is continuing to flow. If so, give God the glory. If the need persists, keep praying.
7. Be sensitive to location and volume. If you are in a public place, step out of the flow of traffic. You may be comfortable with prayer, but it might be new territory for the person receiving it. Seek a little privacy if possible. Also, pray quietly. Remember, the only people who need to hear are you, the person you are praying for, and God.

Order Organic Outreach for Ordinary People: Sharing Good News Naturally from Amazon (affiliate link).

Let me ask you this?

Have you seen how God answers such prayers and how that has helped you have further conversations with your visitors?

If you liked this article, please share it using the bookmark or sharing tool below.

We were also wondering what to include in the welcome packets that we planned to put together.  We had some ideas and some samples from other churches and your suggestions are also helpful.

I can’t thank you enough for clearing things up for me.  It will certainly make my job a lot easier.  I don’t feel like I’m spinning in circles anymore.

Bless you,
Ina

Get your download copy here: How to Welcome Church Visitors

Church Hospitality Audit 2.0

The original Church Hospitality Assessment was released  February 2007 and has been downloaded over 2100 times.

Download your Free Church Hospitality Survey

Use this church hospitality survey form as part of your regular church hospitality review.

This will to help you evaluate how welcoming or visitor friendly your church is.

Sample questions from the Church Hospitality Survey 2.0

___ Is your church’s name easy to read from the road?
___ Is it easy to tell which entrance to use for the church office?
___ Does the exterior and overall appearance of your church look well maintained and attractive?
___ Are the restrooms all clean?
___ Are all rooms in the church clearly marked?
___ Are there stacks of old bulletins, old magazines, or out-of-date church brochures which should be discarded?
___ Are the bulletin boards current?
___ Do you have adequate lighting in hallways, classrooms, and the worship center?
___ Are the rooms for infants and toddlers both attractive and clean?
___ Are large print bulletins available?
___ Do you have greeters positioned at the entrances to the church?
___ Are members of your church prepared to extend brunch or dinner invitations to your guests?

There are 9 pages of questions like this free 14 page download report.

Download Your Free Church Hospitality 2.0 Audit here

Note: There is a file embedded within this post, please visit this post to download the file.
If you have found this tool helpful, I’d appreciate hearing about. Would you write me an email and tell me what results came out of your audit?

As we talked further on the phone, we kicked around a few ideas unique to their church, but developed some ideas that are useful to many churches.

So here are 6 steps to a successful “Invite a Friend Day.”

These are the steps we followed in May when we launched our morning worship service.  Read on to see what happened.

1.  Build a base of prayer.

• Encourage people to pray for this particular Sunday
• Have people write down names of potential guests on a card and pray daily.
• Ask God for opportunities to invite people.
• Read 10 ways to pray for more invitations.

2.  Build momentum.

• Make an announcement each week.
• Pastors: talk about your personal invitations to others.
• Cast vision for hospitality and welcome
• Prepare marketing materials your people can give away.
• Read Refreshing a Vision for Church Hospitality

3.  Update / Review your hospitality systems.

• Cast a fresh vision for your greeters and ushers of welcoming the church visitor.
• Give your building / meeting space a fresh review for cleanliness and presentation.
• Review your method to get visitor contact information.
• Update your visitor follow-up process to current information.
• Read Review your Church Hospitality Ministries

4.  Give people tools to invite their friends.

• Distribute invitation cards
• Distribute flyers.
• They can share with their networks like Facebook.
• Give people online tools to share with their networks.
• Update your webpage to feature the sermon series.
• (Read Business Card Outreach Idea for Church Members).

5.  Launch a sermon series that day.

• Launch a 3-4 week sermon series around a life problem.
• Use the series to show the Bible is relevant to life.
• Give opportunity for people to respond to the gospel message.
• Foreshadow the next installment to increase the possibility of a return visit.
• Lift up opportunities for people to build new friendships or give themselves away in service.

6.  Have a follow-up “meet the pastor” type event.

• Prepare a social event within a few weeks of the first Sunday.
• Invite your guests to that event.
• Showcase the mission of the church and its involvement in the neighborhood.
• Invite people to serve in the community.

Our story:

These were the steps we followed in the launch of our day in May 2010.

We had prayer going, we talked about this day for 2-3 months ahead, we had marketing materials and a relevant theme: “Starting Over.”  We had social tools to share online, and lots of invitations went forth.

We had great success in attracting people to our service.

We only expected 30 people, but had 70 actually attend that day.

However, we failed to complete these last two steps.

We had a great launch, but lost lots of momentum because we had nothing related the next Sunday we met.

The following Sunday was an unrelated sermon topic that people failed to rally around.

The invitations dropped way off, such that only 40 people came.

As we retool for the next launch this fall, those last two steps will be critical for us in continuing to build our base.

Video: [Thoughts of a Church Visitor]

I found this video this morning while preparing for a workshop in Richmond VA.

It captures the private thoughts of a first time church visitor as they prepare to come to your church.

If you have a church hospitality committee or welcome committee of some kind, consider using this video in your training.

Discuss

• What can your greeters do to help this visitor feel safe?
• What can your pastor do to help this visitor feel welcome?
• What can your church members do to help this visitor feel welcome?
• What are some steps you can take to expect and meet this visitors potential need?

Share your thoughts in the comments below. . .

I’ve got a new product just released, it’s a digital download on conduction a hospitality review.

Read more at Regularly Evaluate Your Hospitalty Ministry

Read more here: