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Help Church Visitors Make Connections

Last Updated: April 18, 2019 by EvangelismCoach

God sovereignly brings visitors to your church.

But once people are first welcomed into your church during their first visit, what happens when the service is over?

How do you help your church visitor connect?

Build bridges.

How we made the next step to connecting with a local church via informal assimilation. Click to Tweet

Help Your Church Visitor Build Relationships and Make Friends

When we were first married and moved to Chicago, we started attending an Assembly of God and went to a Sunday school class for married couples.

Socializing after the class, we had lots of things in common with 3 other couples: newlywed transplants from another state.

Then the phone calls began to happen.

  • “Hey, Tom had surgery, come over and play cards.”
  • “Hey, let’s go to dinner.”
  • “Hey, let’s have a cookout.”
  • “Hey, what are you doing. Let’s watch a movie tonight.”

Pretty soon, two things began to happen as we spent time together.

  1. We felt connected to the local church.
  2. We developed deep and intimate friendships that are now 25 years old.

Connecting to a Church

This got started because someone took the initiative to get us together and we met over a meal and played cards.

An act of hospitality.

A simple next step.

This turned into deep relationships that last.

How to help church visitors connect:

  • If you have small groups, have leaders intentionally invite church visitors to their small group.
  • Invite church visitors to your home for lunch or dinner (don’t worry about dessert or a spotless house — I heard a story this week about a woman who made her sister use a restroom at a gas station because her house wasn’t ready to receive her sister — sure, it needs to be clean, but not perfect)
  • Invite church visitors out for a snack / lunch / dinner or something with a group from the church.
  • If you prayed with the visitor after service, make a phone call during the week.
Read I Can’t Get In and find that video.

Let me ask you this?

What methods do you use to help church visitors connect with your family?

Read More:

Girls_ChurchVisitorAssimilationTool

You might like to read . . .

  • Evaluate Your Hospitality Program for the Price of a Cup of Coffee
  • How do we measure the impact of church hospitality
  • Break the Barriers Hospitality Training on DVD
  • How to keep church visitors coming back after Christmas
  • 4 Keys to Keep More of Your Church Visitors
  • 3 Reasons Church Visitors Come Back - Thom Ranier
  • 6 Steps to Organize an Invite a Friend Day
  • The View of a First Time Church Visitor
  • Assimilating Visitors to Your Church
Related posts:
Church Hospitality Webinar Slides Only and Related Resources
My Top 10 Books on Church Hospitality
Church Greeter Tips: Show Respect for your Guests
14 Bible Verses on Welcoming the Stranger
10 Practices to Welcome Church Visitors

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Originally Posted: December 31, 2018 Category: Church HospitalityTag: assimilation, church visitors, Hospitality
Previous Post:44 Spiritual Conversation Starter Questions
Next Post:Your Turn: How to Identify Church Visitors in a Large ChurchHow do some large churches identify their first time visitors
Connecting to a Church

Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. EvangelismCoach

    November 2, 2015 at 10:14 am

    Rosa, what a great question. . .

    First off, it’s hard to grow a church when there isn’t a vision to grow. Particularly when the pastor says “Not my job.” The pastor is the vision setter and if that fails, there’s not much once can do about it.

    As to how to connect with visitors, the best way in a group that size is to give an invite to something afterwards, like go to a meal together, hang out together, or something for the friendship to begin to form.

    I think in most places, visitation has changed to intrusion, so meeting out in a public space for tea, coffee, lunch is a better way to go.

  2. Rosa

    November 2, 2015 at 9:55 am

    In order to phone a new person, you need to find out their phone number. Our pastor says that people don’t like to give out their phone numbers and like we shouldn’t even ask. My church of about 30 rarely has a visitor but in case we did, we can’t even find a piece of paper to write their name on. And what would we do with the paper? Hmmm, the new pastor isn’t much of the visitation type, and even told us, that he wasn’t hired to grow the church and besides, it isn’t his problem. The C.E. program and the married couples club folded a few years back. There is no protocol for inviting people back, and “shore-nuff” we don’t have that problem. People never come back! Well, hardly ever. Hmmm, do you have some ideas.????? We have a coffee time and people are friendly then, but it doesn’t go farther than that.

Trackbacks

  1. » » Assimilating Visitors to Your Church says:
    February 18, 2008 at 2:18 am

    […] new book has been released about turning Visitors into Members, also known as visitor […]

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