Evaluate Your Hospitality Program for the Price of a Cup of Coffee

Many churches have special events with the idea of “invite a friend” or to open up their church to the neighborhood.

Churches put on Christmas cantatas, Easter services, special services for Lenten series, or a variety of other means.

As a church leader, invite one of your friends to come and make a free hospitality assessment.

Avoid Visitor Cards like this

Someone had a really bad experience visiting a church – so bad they shared it on twitter.

I blacked out the church name.  The visitor card pictured below came across my Evangelismcoach twitter feed this week.

I hope your church doesn’t receive visitor cards like this.

Church Visitors want a good welcome experience.

Research shows

• 50% of the unchurched choose a church because of friendliness of its members.
• 45% of the churched visitors choose a church because of friendliness of its members.

Hospitality ministries are not the only reason people come back.

Your hospitality program is a contributing factor in why people connect with a church.

Over the last several years, I have visited several churches in different states (US) and countries in Latin America.

I’ve visited

• English language congregations,
• Spanish Language congregations in 9 countries, and
• Two Mandarin speaking congregations.

Denominations vary from

• independent,
• Presbyterian,
• Christian Reformed,
• Pentecostal,
• Salvation Army,
• Church of God General Conference,
• United Methodist,
• along with other groups of Pentecostal and Charismatic churches.

Worship styles varied from:

• traditional to contemporary,
• contemplative to highly celebratory, including one church that nearly danced for the entire hour of upbeat fast tempo celebration songs.

My experience as a first time church visitor in all these different contexts continue to bring me fresh ideas on how to welcome church visitors into your midst.

Can I visit your church to measure your hospitality?

I am often asked if I could make a visit to evaluate the hospitality program of a particular congregation.

Churches have even offered to pay me to make a secret visit to measure the welcome I receive.  They assume that my experience will give me the eyes to see what they are missing in their hospitality system.

While that may be true, I can’t make hospitality assessment visits to everyone who asks.

Two Free Ways You can Assess your Welcome Experience

Let me give you two ways to have your church hospitality experience evaluated for free (or maybe for the price of a cup of coffee).

1.  Ask a unchurched friend of yours to make a visit.

I assume you have friends who don’t go to church.

If not, you need to go make some.  (Build Relationships)

Approach one of your friends and ask them to visit your church so that you can learn about how your church really welcomes people.

Allow them to pick any Sunday in the next 4 weeks.  This will give them a sense of safety or freedom to know that a particular sermon wasn’t aimed at them, or that you don’ t have a secret motive to have them hear a particular sermon.

Ask them to keep your friendship a secret during the visit, if possible.  Don’t seek them out and introduce them to all your friends.  Allow their visit to be as anonymous as possible.

The goal is for them to experience what a first time church visitor feels like when they make their first visit to your campus.

2.  Ask a churched friend of your to make a visit.

Ask a friend who attends a different church, and maybe in a different Christian tradition, to visit your church one Sunday in the next six weeks.

They may need to make sure their own responsibilities at their own church are covered, so give them time to make arrangements.

As above, ask them to keep your friendship as anonymous as possible.

Because they are churched, they will likely pay attention to your greeters and ushers, and make comparisons to what they think they experience at their own church.

Then: Invite them to share and reflect with you.

After your friends make their visits, invite them to reflect with you about their experience of your hospitality program and welcome.

Listen to the stories on their experience and feel free to ask.  For example:

1. Did anyone say hello to them?
2. Did they leave knowing someone’s name?
3. Were they invited to come back for the next visit?
4. Did an aggressive person recruit them for a church program, like the choir or finance committee?
5. Were there questions that your visitor had that they couldn’t get an easy answer to?
6. Did they feel safe?
7. Did they feel valued?
8. Could they find their way to their seat without much problem?
9. Did they easily learn what your church offers their children?
10. Was there anything that they didn’t understand?
11. Did they feel lost or confused or out of place in the worship service at any time?
12. Were the people friendly?
13. Was it easy to find classrooms, restrooms, a seat, etc.?
14. Was the facility attractive and inviting?
15. Did they feel comfortable?
16. Who did it feel like the church was for?
17. What did the signs, printed materials say about the church?
18. Was the service easy to follow?
19. Did they feel included or like an outsider?
20. If they had desired to make a commitment, get more information or seek prayer, were they able to find it?
21. Most of all, did they feel a spiritual connection?

As you talk with your friend, you’ll likely notice that unchurched visitor and the churched visitor have different perspectives.

As you talk with them, your curiosity will cause other questions to come to mind .

As you listen, you will get ideas of some of the hidden barriers that your congregation puts up.

Take it one step further

Take this exercise a step further and have each member of your hospitality committee ask two or three people to make such a visit.

Then meet as a committee after you have debriefed with your friends and share the ideas and insights that come from this free research.

Download Tools under $15 to help you improve your hospitality

Each one of these tools can help you with training.  Click on their links to learn more.

• Create a Culture of Church Hospitality – audio download that includes 14 ways to cast vision.
• Evaluate your Church hospitality – audio download on reviewing your systems
• Church Greeters 101 for Kindle or Paperback

More Free Resources to Assess Your Welcome

• Start this free tutorial video series on fixing your greeter ministry.
• Download a free church hospitality assessment.
• Idea: visit another church in the area yourself. This will help you think like a visitor by developing empathy for their experience.

If you want to pay for a church shopper..

Brian Beauford oversees, the weekend experiences, communications, marketing and location expansions for the church where he serves.

He hired an anonymous church shopper one line, and then held a face to face interview with the guest.

It was an easy task to do.

1. Post a task on TaskRabbit or Craigslist.
2. Tell your welcome team they are coming at some unknown point in the future (give them a chance to spruce up their areas)
3. Meet with the guest shopper afterwards and learn.
4. Pay them.

Brian writes about the whole experience here:  How we do Church Secret Shoppers for just $60