How do we measure the impact of church hospitality

The other day, I saw a question in my Twitter feed:

How do we measure our hospitality?

There are a couple of different ways to measure the success of your hospitality ministry.

You could measure effective church hospitality program by

• Volunteers who are excited to serve because of they see impact or influence they have.
• The number of visitors returning for that second visit, third visit, and so on.
• Stories you hear of a good welcome that led to a life transformation.
• The positive buzz you hear from visitors who felt welcomed or really impressed with how they were honored as a guest.
• The number of people inviting their friends, feeling confident that their friends will be welcomed.

These are somewhat subjective and anecdotal measurements of course.

The best measurement

Would you invite your friend to your church?

Think about the last one for a moment.

Let’s say that you’ve invited a friend to church.  They finally agreed to come.

Do you feel confident that your friend would be welcomed well by your church? (That was a risk I took)

Or do you hesitate to invite your friend?

Your hospitality makes a difference

Hospitality ministries are not the only reason people come back, but it is a contributing factor in why people connect with a church.

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.

If your visitors are not coming back, if your volunteers are apathetic, if your hospitality ministry is based on the philosophy of “what happens, happens”, then you might have some problems in your hospitality ministry.

You might have unnecessary and unseen barriers in your hospitality experience.

Hospitality committees are often appointed to fix the problems or improve their hospitality systems.  It is one aspect that churches can fix in their goal of growth or to double their attendance.

But where does the committee start?  How do you begin to analyze the problems in your church hospitality program?

When you start to think about fixing your church hospitality, we often don’t know where to start.  It’s sort of like the grasping at the fog.

Where do we begin?

With a complete  understanding of the systems of hospitality, you’ll find your starting point to removing the unnecessary barriers to helping visitors connect with your church.

I’ve put a resource together for hospitality committees that want to start looking at their systems.

It is a 3 DVD set that you can work through together as a committee.  Each DVD Module contains 5-6 segments, about 10-15 minutes each, together with discussion questions to help you look at your current system of welcoming visitors.

A fourth CD comes with it that includes handouts, discussion guides, slides, and additional audio on hospitality systems.

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

But when they don’t return, you often don’t know what happened. You don’t know what accidental barriers got in the way of their return to your church.

Put an action plan in place

Break the Unseeen Barriers was recorded live with an audience from several churches who want to improve their hospitality.  The discussion questions provoked a lot of thinking and action plans among the attendees who felt re-energized to tackle their hospitality systems.

They left the conference with some starting points for action – solving that problem of not knowing where to begin.

There are 10 suggested discussion segments for your committee that will lead to next action steps you can implement right away to remove some of the unseen barriers that you identify from your discussion.

Perhaps you’ve been wanting to read and learn more about how to improve your church’s welcome experience.

There are plenty of books available on the market, but many seem to be written for large churches with lots of eager volunteers. You may have read some and discovered that many are outdated.

You could hire a consultant to come and take a peek, but that often requires a few thousand dollars.

This DVD resource can be shipped to you within a couple of days.  You can watch the whole thing, or take it in segments with your hospitality team according to your schedule.

Read more or Get one

To read more about this DVD set, read the Description of Break the Unseen Barriers Church Hospitality Training

To order your copy, visit the checkout page here.

photo credit: canonsnapper via cc