If you want more of your first time church visitors to return, one area you can fix is your church hospitality systems.
Each year, church hospitality committees want to
- Restart their stale welcome ministry.
- Take their visitor welcome process to the next level.
So you’ve started 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.
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, and they feel the pressure to “make hospitality work.”
Your hospitality ministry in the church is one of the most important factors in the experience of first time visitors that will influence their personal decision to come back to your church.
Reignite Your First Impressions Ministry
We all want our church visitors to come back. But to get that to happen you need to improve your first impression ministries.
But where do you start?
Get these 7 Secrets to Effective Church Hospitality to give you starting points and ideas that you can implement this weekend.
You need a road map to improving your hospitality ministry
I sell products and coaching services on this website, but before you consider any of that, start by reading through this tutorial for church hospitality committees
- What does a church hospitality committee work on?
- Duties of Church Hospitality Committee or Team
- Identify Your Church Hospitality Blind Spots
- Evaluate your hospitality ministry for free
- 8 Steps to Relaunching A Church Hospitality Committee
- Is Your Church’s Hospitality Committee stuck?
- Conversion to the Church: Helping Visitors Connect
- How do we measure the impact of our church hospitality
- Four Ways to pray for your Welcome Ministry
Duties of Church Hospitality Committee or Team
Your task is to help your guests feel and experience the love of God by truly welcoming them into God’s house through friendly and authentically gracious service.
Your team might want to consider these as focus areas as you work on your church hospitality program.
8 Steps to Relaunching A Church Hospitality Committee
Churches form new church hospitality committees or relaunch a tired committee with new people.
They want to update or infuse their church hospitality program with new ideas.
Do a Quarterly Review Of Hospitality Ministries
Many wise leaders of church hospitality teams know that a regular review of your systems is a good way to make sure things flow smoothly.
Inertia and inefficiency always creep in, and churches are no different.
4 Ways to Pray for Your Church’s Hospitality Ministry
Four areas for leadership teams to pray for your church hospitality work of the ministry.
You can easily spend 30 minutes a week in prayer as part of improving your welcome ministry.
Identify Your Church Hospitality Blind Spots
Sometimes, we simply grow blind to the obvious. Junk gathers in rooms. Church Bulletins from prior weeks are left laying around. Lost and found items keep gathering in a corner. Bulletin boards get out of date. Toilet handles need jiggling. Window sills accumulate dust. In churches, we simply get used to the way things are. …
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. As a church leader, here is a tip to getting a free or nearly free hospitality assessment.
Is Your Church’s Hospitality Ministry Stuck?
Are you starting a church hospitality ministry, or wondering how to start a hospitality ministry in church?
Maybe you are taking first steps to rejuvenate a stale approach?
Help Church Visitors Make Connections
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?
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 best place to start
Improving your church’s welcome ministry is an ongoing process. However, if you are starting your hospitality committee, or working at restarting your welcome process, the best place to start is developing the vision for hospitality ministry in your church.
Have your committee describe the desired outcomes of the first visit:
- Each guest to our church shall _____________________________.
- No guest to our church shall ____________________________.
Next Steps
I offer several items to help you with developing your church hospitality committee over at the EvangelismCoach.org store.
- How to Welcome Church Visitors (ebook)
- Church Greeters 101 (ebook)
- Cast the Vision for Hospitality (Download MP3)
- Church Hospitality Review (Download MP3)
- Break the Barriers DVD set (4 DVD set aimed at helping you identify and remove barriers).
- Greeter Training Webinar #1 (DVD or download)
- Greeter Training DVD #2 (Download)
Do want a discuss how to break through where you are stuck?
I spend time on the phone with your committee, up to 90 minutes, where I help you troubleshoot and develop some action plans.
Author: Chris Walker is the founder of EvangelismCoach.org and teaches evangelism and church hospitality throughout the Americas.