Welcoming guests is one of the most visible ministries in any church. Whether you lead a greeter team or train volunteers to create a warm first impression, these resources will help you strengthen your church greeter training and build a consistent culture of welcome.
Need ready-to-use training for your next meeting?
When Sunday mornings get busy, greeter training often gets pushed aside. These tools make it easy to equip your volunteers without adding hours to your schedule.
Grab the Greeter Training Video Set and train your entire team in under an hour — stream or download instantly.
Prefer a handbook?
Order Church Greeters 101 from Amazon — a step-by-step guide for every greeter ministry leader.
Schedule a Hospitality Coaching Call and get a customized plan to strengthen your greeter ministry and create a lasting culture of welcome.
Want to improve your entire church welcome system? Explore 7 Secrets to Great Church Hospitality for ideas that go beyond the greeter team.
How often should greeters be trained?
Most churches benefit from brief refreshers every few months, plus one full session with all your hospitality volunteers each year to recast vision and update procedures.
What makes a good church greeter?
Warmth, awareness, and a genuine desire to help people feel seen. Skills can be taught and attitude is the foundation.
If you’ve been asked to lead a greeter meeting, it can feel overwhelming. These ten steps will help you prepare a greeter training meeting that encourages your volunteers, builds teamwork, and refreshes your church’s vision for hospitality.
Every Sunday, I see commentary on Twitter about the joys at serving as a church greeter, complaints about experiences with rude church greeters, sarcasm aimed at unprepared greeters at church, and nervous greeters announcing how nervous they are. But if you can help your new church greeters know what to aim for, it might help them to rise to the occasion.
Churches of all size know the importance of your greeter volunteers. This might include the ushers, parking hosts, and connection center teams.
If you are a new church greeter, check out these ten quick tips to help you serve well your first day.
One of the harder roles of a church hospitality ministry leader is to correct behavior that can have long reaching negative consequences.
Let me give you a few tips I've used to provide feedback to church greeters and correction to careless mistakes by hospitality ministry volunteers.
Videos can make for great discussion starters at your gatherings for hospitality workers or church greeters. Use as a discussion starter for your next church greeter training or hospitality training meeting. I enjoyed the humor and the painfully true characterizations.
Every church greeter should have a cheat sheet of quick tips. Turn this into a quick bookmark or printable. #1: Pray #2: Observe #3: Initiate #4: Smile #5: Serve
How a church greeter left a wrong first impression on our family as we visited a local church for the second and third time. I felt myself making a mental note to not use that entry door. Yet, we continue to push through this and explore if this is a church we are called to serve in this stage of life.
As the hospitality ministry leader, it is important that you give constructive feedback or helpful tips to your church greeters on a regular basis.
This includes feedback on actions that have the potential to invade a guest's personal space.
Church greeters should not accidentally violate A person's sense of personal space.
Encourage your church greeters to set aside their personal preferences (e.g., "I'm a hugger") for a normal greeting that is customary and culturally appropriate to where your church is located
How can you prepare your church greeters for an unexpected visitor with a therapeautic dog? Rev. Susan and I talk about an experience of the unexpected that occurred during a church visit. She took a therapeutic dog to church and experienced different kinds of reactions to the presence of a dog. From the pastor From …
Some days, your church greeter volunteer will wake up in the morning with a not so helpful attitude. Check out these tweets:
I received a good question via email the other day. (Ask your question here). If you have a suggestion to help our reader, please add it to the comments below. How do I approach an usher who smokes and it smells on her? I am not the President of the usher board but would like …
If you are involved in recruiting and training of church greeters, you will likely run into a church greeter who says But I don’t know who the first time visitors are!!!! They may use that to avoid answering your call to recruit them for a given Sunday or for a given rotation on your schedule. …
A holy life will make the deepest impression. Lighthouses blow no horns, they just shine. “It is a great deal better to live a holy life than to talk about it. We are told to let our light shine, and if it does we won’t need to tell anybody it does. The light will be …
A Scripture filled prayer for church greeters as part of their preparation for ministry at church
Over 6 years of teaching on church greeters, I’ve assembled many church greeter resources of my own. Here is a quick list of how to get it all and where to find it.
Church greeter ministry is a vital part of welcoming visitors to your church. Sadly, this aspecct of welcome ministry gets neglected, overlooked, or relegated to auto-pilot, ending up with church leaders begging for unmotivated volunteers who fill a space. Introducing Chuch Greeters 101 Church Greeters 101 leads you forward in starting or relaunching the greeter …
Not every church greeter volunteer will be ready to greet your visitors.
I often get asked by greeter team leaders how to help a shy church greeter get started.
Here are 3 tips for church greeter coordinators that may help.
I would love for you to have success in church greeter recruiting and for you to have more volunteers for church greeters ministry than spaces you could fill. However, I’m not sure there are churches where people fight to be volunteer church greeters. If you find yourself struggling to recruit volunteers for your greeting ministry, …
One task of any church greeter organizer is to recruit new greeters. I found the following fictional conversation: Church Greeters… Pastor: “Hey, we need someone for the ‘front lines’ of Sunday church services. Would you be willing to greet people at the door?” You: “Umm. Sure! I like people and I’m willing to stand there and say …
Church Greeters can do a wonderful job but if the congregation fails behind them, their best efforts at welcoming visitors will be undermined by a negative impression.
Here is a practical discussion starter to use in a church greeter training meeting. The goal of the discussion starter is for your greeter team to think through ways they might respond to a person with such questions.
Do your new church greeter volunteers need training? What about those who have been serving 20 years?
Let me challenge you to rethink your answer.
One reader put a challenge to me about whether or not a greeter ministry was appropriate in a church. Why have church greeters? Since I teach and train on good hospitality practices such as greeter ministry and other church growth issues, it’s a question that I’ve been pushed to re-look at. In chapter 1 of …
