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What barriers keep your church visitors from returning?

Every church wants their first time visitors to come back and begin to

• Find their own faith in Jesus Christ.
• Find a place to serve with their gifts and talents
• Find a place to make a difference in advancing the kingdom of God.

All of this begins as visitors attend and then connect with your church.

But when they don’t return, you often don’t know what happened.

Perhaps you’ve spent money on advertising like a direct mail campaign or business cards members give away. You’ve designed sermon series to hopefully entice a second visit.

You’ve done a lot of hard work to get visitors to come to your church, but they fail to return.

It’s frustrating to work so hard and then feel like it’s all in vain. It leaves you wondering –

Will our church ever reach new people for Christ?

You don’t know what accidental barriers got in the way of their return to your church.

So they walk out the back door, and you are left wondering. Why did they leave?

When church visitors don’t come back for that second or third visit, your church will not grow.

Every church leader wants their church to have an evangelistic impact in leading people to faith in Christ.

• A newcomer seeking Christ who finally responds to a member’s personal invitation to church.
• A newcomer that finally gathers the courage to visit a church after several bad experiences years before.

Perhaps you’ve seen that newcomer in your church, but they fail to return.

If visitors don’t return, you can’t help them find faith in Christ.

Do you make a good first impression?

Do you make a great first impression?

The first step to a return visit starts with a great first impression.

A good first impression can lead to a second visit.

A second visit leads to a third visit.

Additional visits provide more opportunity for your church visitor to make new friends.

Keep your visitors coming back and making friends, and hopefully,

• they might find faith in Christ along the way, or
• they might find that place to serve in your church’s ministries!

Red Carpet Hospitality Conference

We wanted you to know about more impacts from your time with us. We’ve had a few folks here at Nineveh really engage your teaching on hospitality. The one that sticks with us is the change from “inviting people to return next Sunday” to “finding a friend.”

We’ve had much discussion around giving folks “10 minutes of friendship,” and are reshaping our greeting ministry with that in mind. So thanks for sharing that insight!

I’ve also had some echoes of appreciation for your time with our Presbytery teaching on personal evangelism. Many felt that it’s just what our churches need at this time in our life together.

Emrys Tyler, Pastor

If you are near St. Simons Island, GA  (USA), attend this church leaders conference focused on helping you start creatively thinking about ways to solve this puzzle for your congregation.

Some of what you will cover:

• How Hospitality Serves the Growth of the Church
• What hidden barriers keep visitors away and how to fix them
• 8 Reasons your visitors wont come back
• How to help visitors begin to make a friend
• How to help your volunteers excel in their hospitality ministry.
• How physical facilities shape first impressions and some possible quick fixes for under $100
• Principles of organizing your hospitality ministry
• 5 systems that affect your organization
• What techniques can not accomplish
• Possible ways to organize your teams.
• The flow chart of a visitor’s experience

I found Chris’ approach extremely helpful as he spoke using a language accessible to clergy and laypersons. He has organized and developed his information which makes it much easier for me to teach elders, deacons, and volunteers to practice hospitality.

Chris provides more than sound bites, he provides a methodology for churches to begin using, so they would then be able to adapt to their own particular context.

Most people charged with serving as greeters in the church may not only have no clue to what they are doing, without this training they may even be harmful to the work of greeting and hospitality.

Chris spent time with the seminar participants to help them move away from a less than gracious approach to newcomers and instead, to see it as a calling or an opportunity to share the peace of Jesus Christ.

Rev. Ernest Gardner, III

Who is this Conference For

Wise church leaders will review their hospitality systems and look for unnecessary barriers that keep those church visitors from coming back. Wise church leaders will do advance hospitality preparations in expectation of new church visitors.

Whether you are the

• Senior Pastor
• Head of the Greeter / Ushers.
• The leader of your church hospitality ministry
• Chair of the committee that oversees your church welcome ministry

Wise hospitality ministry leaders will

• Review their facility navigation
• Review their current facility appearance.
• Review their church visitor follow-up process.
• Review their status of current hospitality ministries
• Review their current church greeter process / volunteers
• Review their process to how they get church visitor contact information.

Doing this kind of review will often reveal a bunch of

• We need to fix this.
• We ought-a
• We should have . . .

Each time your team does a review of it’s systems, you’ll

• Tweak what has broken
• Think of what might be missing and provide it
• Think of how to improve your welcome and greeter process.

By improving your welcome of church visitors, you can impress the visitor who is church shopping, whether they are Christian yet or not.

You can have a worship experience that helps people encounter God.

You can put some new touches on your building and grounds to help your visitors and members easily navigate your facility.

Set aside the time to do this

At the 31st Annual ASC Conference, you will have time to do this with your team and volunteers.

Come to learn some of the practical ways Chris has discovered to grow your church out of his research, study, and first hand real life experience from serving as a local pastor, planting two churches and doing evangelism work cross culturally in 10 different countries.

Chris has distilled dozens of books and 20 years of hospitality teaching into this one day seminar to help your committee have a laser like focus on these issues.  You can follow the trail he’s made, rather than creating one your self.

Event is open to the public and other churches are invited to register and attend.

The deadline for registration is Thursday, February 22, 2018.

Details:

Where: Epworth-by-the-Sea. St Simons Island, GA

When: March 16-18, 2018

How to Register

Comments from Participants

• It’s comprehensive, vital and helpful. Not a business model, but a formational model rooted in the biblical vision of the Kingdom.
• Lots of info about the logistics of visitors, hospitality, etc.
• You will learn some practical things to help your church be a warm and welcoming place for visitors.
• It gives a solid concept of building a hospitality team and ministry in church.
• Want to learn how to engage visitors to the church? Go hear Chris speak. He spells it out for you.
• It will help you understand the importance of hospitality and how to implement a plan.

More Reasons to Attend the 31st Annual ASC Conference

So you’ve put together a hospitality committee . . .

• These committee members desire to help your church grow.
• They want to help newcomers find a relationship with Jesus.
• They want newcomers to connect with members of the church.
• They desire to make the right moves in improving the church hospitality program.

Some volunteers are new to hospitality ministries and have no idea where to start making improvements.

Other members are appointed by the pastor to fix the problems.

They feel the pressure to “make hospitality work.”

So they search the internet for subjects like:

• church visitor welcome and
• hospitality at church
• ideas for church hospitality programs

With so much information available, where do they start to fix the broken system?

Perhaps you were

• Recently recruited to serve on your church’s hospitality committee.
• Asked to start your church’s hospitality ministry.
• Asked to train your church hospitality team.
• Appointed by your pastor to figure out how to warm up your church’s welcome.

You don’t need to recreate the wheel.

You just need to somewhere to start.

You just need a refresher to help you get a great overview of your system.

Register Yourself for the 31st Annual ASC Conference

Has your welcome ministry been neglected?

Maybe you realize that your hospitality ministry has run on auto-pilot for the last few years. It has decayed to the point where something has to be done.

Inertia and inefficiency always creep in to systems, and churches are no different.

Perhaps your church has accidentally created barriers to helping that first time visitor decide to return for a following Sunday. It happens when things are running on autopilot.

You don’t give them a good impression, nor wow them with love and welcome.

You simply hand them a bulletin, and maybe say good morning.

You could spend a few thousand dollars on getting people to 100 additional people to attend your service. But if only one out of a hundred return for a second service, you’re successful marketing efforts are wasted on the lack of retention.

If you are planning

• a huge outreach,
• a direct mail campaign
• launch of a Vacation Bible School
• social media blitz to get people to a new sermon series

then are you ready to receive the people who come, or will a poor welcome undermine all your advance work and prayer?

Help Your Visitors Make that decision to come back.

Hospitality to first time visitors is one critical element to growing your church.

It plays a huge role in helping visitors decide to make that all important second visit.

Your church can make an eternal difference in the life of your visitors, if you can help them come back on a regular basis.

Every church wants their first time church visitors to come back and start connecting.

Every church wants newcomers to connect and find faith, friendships, and a place to serve in the transformation of a community.

Register Yourself for the 31st Annual ASC Conference

Do you have all your church hospitality systems but still feel like your volunteers are disorganized and lack the vision for your church’s hospitality?

How do you create a vision for red carpet church hospitality that is beyond the pastor and church hospitality committee?

Maybe you realize that your hospitality ministry has run on auto-pilot for the last few years. It has decayed to the point where something has to be done.

Inertia and inefficiency always creep in to systems, and churches are no different.

Perhaps your church has accidentally created barriers to helping that first time visitor decide to return for a following Sunday. It happens when things are running on autopilot.

Your systems and processes for your church’s hospitality can always be improved, and decaying systems can be refreshed.

Hospitality ministry is not about marketing to get visitors.

Rather, it is about giving a great impression to your visitor and helping them make a decision to return and learn more about your congregation’s ministry, mission, and people.

Your hospitality ministry can be improved with some attention given to it. This seminar is geared to hospitality teams in small to mid-size churches that want to start, grow, or re-fresh their hospitality ministry.

Chris Walker will help you take your hospitality ministry to the next level at the “31st Annual Association of Smaller Congregations” at Epworth-by-the-Sea, St. Simons Island, GA 31522

March 16-18, 2018