Regularly Evaluate Your Hospitality Ministry

Wise church leaders will regularly evaluate their church hospitality program.

Later this month, I will help two churches evaluate their church hospitality ministry as they prepare to welcome new guests this fall.

Summer is perfect time

The summer months in the United States are traditionally a slower season of church programming and activities.

But, it’s also a great time to prepare and plan for the fall launch of new programming, new sermon series, and new initiatives.

Most of our churches in the US can experience a renewed cycle of growth in September as families return from summer travel and schools start up again.

Why Evaluate Your Church’s Hospitality Ministry

New visitors will come this fall.  New families will have moved into the neighborhood and will be looking for a church.

Is your church hospitality still running in tip-top shape to welcome and receive new visitors?

Are your church hospitality processes flowing smoothly, or is stuff falling through the cracks?

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

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

When to Evaluate Your Church’s Hospitality System

I suggest doing an in depth church hospitality evaluation quarterly.

If you are launching some big event like a sermon series that is designed to increase the number of first time visitors, you might want to do one a few weeks ahead of time.  Back up a few weeks from that Sunday and schedule an evaluation of your church’s hospitality system.

You might also choose to do a brief church hospitality review each week as part of your worship planning.

I know of several churches that review their past service each week and do a quick review of how things went hospitality wise.  Takes no more than 2-3 minutes to do a mental sweep to see if something caught your attention, or the attention of your volunteers, that needs to be fixed.

As part of a regular in-depth evaluation of their hospitality 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 in depth evaluation of your church’s hospitality will often reveal a bunch of

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

Example of a evaluation of hospitality ministry

In a church hospitality coaching conversation, I led a leader in thinking through various areas related to the visitor experience.

I somewhat followed a flowchart in chapter 7 of my e-book on How to Welcome Church Visitors.

The Fruit of Evaluating Your Hospitality Ministry

One fruit of the review is to discover areas of potential friction (that which makes your visitors feel uneasy, or even your volunteers feel uneasy) and remove it.

This review simply removed some rough edges that might make a visitor feel confused, disoriented, or a little uneasy.

Now, their solutions won’t magically keep new visitors.

It was an area of incremental improvement.

By taking the time (that conversation lasted about 1 hour) to do a review, this leader had several action steps of incremental improvement.

Each time your team evaluates your hospitality ministry, it is a chance to:

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

New Resource

I’ve recorded a 1 hour long seminar on doing a hospitality review, now available by instant download after purchase. . .  It’s MP3 format for, and priced at $10.

It is an overview of the entire church welcome system, plus some vision casting for hospitality ministries, but can be a helpful guide to evaluate your hospitality ministry.

As with our products, there is a 30 day money back guarantee.

No hassle refunds.