Has this happened to you?
You invite a friend to church because you are excited about a new sermon series.
They are polite, but continue to dismiss your invitation with “Some day.”
The timing of your church invitation just doesn’t resonate with them.
How can you change that?
How can you increase the likelihood that your friend will say Yes and come to your church? [Read more…] about When to invite someone to church and not get rejected
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
These are somewhat subjective and anecdotal measurements of course.
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?
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
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.
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.
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.
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
Every weekend, we challenge our church members to invite someone to the next sermon series.
Each week, we call our church members to invite someone to small group.
You probably do it to.
In fact, many people would rather give a church invitation than personally share the gospel.
Have you seen that happen?
I have.
A recent conversation I’ve been participating in is
Yes or No: Does an invitation to church equal evangelism?
If one holds to a technical definition of evangelism as proclamation of the gospel, then a church invitation is not evangelism.
The definition of evangelism usually involves the announcement of our sinful condition before God and God’s remedy in Christ.
An invitation to church has nothing to do with the proclamation of the gospel.
Sure, it’s a triggering event to hear the gospel.
But the act of inviting someone to church is not evangelism.
I consider evangelism as the entire process
If one considers evangelism as a process or journey that has many elements to it, than an invitation to church is one element.
It’s an evangelistic element.
It’s a link in the chain of the evangelistic journey, so to speak. (See this video about links in the evangelism chain)
Every conversation about faith, every rumination in the late night hours, every invitation to church, every sermon heard, every bible verse read, every small group conversation all become “seeds” that that the Lord uses in the drawing process.
John 6:44 “No one can come to Me unless the Father who sent Me draws Him, and I will raise him up on the last day.”
An invitation to church can be part of the drawing process.
It’s an evangelistic activity.
When two of John’s disciples overheard John say, “Look, here is the Lamb of God!” they followed Jesus.
Jesus turned and asked, “What are you looking for?”
They responded, “”Rabbi where are you staying?”
Jesus said, “Come and see.” “They came and saw where he was staying, and they remained with him that day.” John 1:35-39 (NRSV)
Even the disciples were invited to spend time in the presence of Jesus.
Then Andrew turned to his brother and invited him: “Come and see.”
As I mention in this post in Growing from Witness to Evangelist, there are different levels of evangelistic activity.
I have found this little tool helpful to offer to people in my seminars. Here is how to use it:
Take a moment and place yourself on that scale.
Then offer a sharing time and have people set a goal for their personal growth in evangelism.
(Image Credit for Child in the Road: Image Credit)
“Overall, 31% of active churchgoers said they would definitely invite someone they know who does not usually attend a church to accompany them to a church service on Easter weekend this year.”
Let’s say this statistic would hold true for your congregation. [Read more…] about 4 Ways to Ramp up Your Easter Outreach
A reader contacted me via Ask EvangelismCoach:
“Pastor, our small church needs help organizing a Friends and Family day for the end of August to launch our new season.
Can you help us?”
As we talked on the phone, we kicked around a few ideas unique to their church, but developed some ideas that are useful to many churches.
So here are 6 steps to a successful “Invite a Friend Day.”
These are the steps we followed in May when we launched our morning worship service. Read on to see what happened.
These were the steps we followed in the launch of our day in May 2010.
Our core team of nearly 25 people started with prayer.
We talked about this day for 2-3 months ahead.
We had marketing materials and a relevant theme: “Starting Over.”
We had social tools to share online, and lots of personal invitations to church were made.
We had great success in attracting people to our service.
We only expected 30 people, but had 70 actually attend that day.
However, we failed to complete these last two steps mentioned above.
We had a great launch, but lost lots of momentum because we had nothing related the next Sunday we met.
The following Sunday was an unrelated sermon topic that people failed to rally around and invite their friends.
The invitations dropped way off, such that only 40 people came.
As we retool for the next launch this fall, those last two steps will be critical for us in continuing to build our base.
Each week, I send out new articles to help you grow your church through personal evangelism, invitations, improving your greeter ministry, and refreshing your vision for church hospitality.
Charles Arn has surveyed thousands of people: (Source: 3 Questions for Charles Arn)
In your research, have you found that there’s one specific reason that visitors come to church?
The friendship factor.
We’ve asked more than 50,000 people over the last 10 years why they came to church, and between 75 and 90 percent of respondents say, “I began attending because someone invited me.”
In an earlier study, people came to church through the following forms of contact:
In Other Studies:
But only 2% of church people invite an unchurched person to church? (Thom Ranier, 2003).
Can we change that, particularly as Easter approaches?
Recently, I listened to Church Talk Radio and they had a brief 5 minute segment on praying your work in inviting people to church. I added the last four.
I hope many of you are preparing your Easter events, or a new sermon series to kick off after Easter.
Each week, I send out new articles to help you grow your church through personal evangelism, invitations, improving your greeter ministry, and refreshing your vision for church hospitality. It comes out weekly.
Source Photo: I’m down on my knees, I wanna take you there (Explored), (license)
