Jun 2
More than Hello
What does it take to feel and know that you have just experienced an “over the top” experience as a guest. I want to think about it in the context of church.
- If you’ve ever visited a church - what was done to make you feel welcome?
- … Did you ever feel unwelcome? Why? (don’t mention any church by name)
- Forcing you to wear a sombrero on your birthday at Mexican Restaurants might be okay - but probably not at the church. Have you ever experienced ”guest relations” overkill in the context of church? In what way?
Let me know what you think!
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This post made me laugh because we had this discussion before we launched Embrace Church as a core team many times, and we always used to joke about the “visitor’s sombrero” How funny!
Hey JR
I can tell you that we have visited many churches before finding Freedom. A hand shake and a smile go a LONG way. I think that people realizing you are visiting and just taking the time to say hello says a lot for a church. We have visited churches and never went back because we just didn’t feel welcome. When you walk in to a church and people look at you like you do not belong it is very uncomfortable. We have never experienced overkill in any of our visits.
We always feel welcome and comfortable at Freedom and so do our children. In fact we have been out of town and missed the last 2 weeks and our kids have been so disappointed. We look forward to seeing everyone on Sunday
God Bless and keep up His work!
Dana
Since you have had the discussion so many times….what did you come up with?
JR
I am not sure I can give you an exact system…I often tell people that if they dont like “organized religion” they should join Embrace Church, because we are disorganized faith.
One thing that we do that is a little different is that we dont have greeters. I have visited many churches with greeters who offer the hello and the handshake and the smile right at the door, but in my skepticism, Im thinking to myself, “This is your job.”
So we all just hang out in the welcome area, drinking coffee, and then when folks come in, we are right there to say hello, shake hands, and get names. This means every person will be greeted, but on one Sunday, our first-time guests may be greeted by several different people.
Then of course, if our guests have a child, one of our volunteers will offer to walk them back to the childcare area and get the little one signed in.
In the welcome area, we have two tables on each side, one has coffee and drinks and the other has donut holes, bagles, cereal, milk, etc…our volunteers always make sure that guests are taken to the breakfast tables…
We do an intermission between the music and message to avoid that painfully awkward transition, and we always go up to the guests and do a half-time check, “Enjoying yourself so far?”
Afterwards, we just try to catch everyone before they leave and say thanks for coming one more time.
From the platform, we always thank those who are with us for the first time, but we never call anybody out or single anybody out. (Bessie brought her aunt Birtha today, let’s all turn and stare, judge her outfit for church worthiness, and then clap)
So bascially we don’t have a real fine-tuned system of greeting, because the vision of Embrace is to be a group of friends that gets bigger each week and comes together for a great church service…and friendship is organic and not systematic. It has worked well for us so far, but we dont claim to be experts!
Thanks for asking
When we started going to our church, the thing that really struck me at first was the lady at the guest table in the lobby was genuinely happy to see us. It wasn’t forced (you can always tell when it is), and she really helped make us feel like we belong there.
The kids programs literally drew our kids into the rooms. Our kids were in 1 church all their lives, so I halfway expected some hesitance from the kids. They walked up, saw what was going on, and went straight in. Some of that may be because of the decorations and the overall look of the rooms (they’re pretty cool), but more than that, I think it was welcoming atmosphere that did it for them.
The “guest relations overkill” that I hate is when churches point out visitors individually. “Tommy has some friends with him today…Tommy, who is that with you?” That works ok if Tommy’s friends are the outgoing type, but if they’re more bashful, it gets really awkward. Of course, nothing tops the awkwardness when Tommy just happens to be sitting next to the visitors and has no clue who they are (and didn’t introduce himself before the service).
Ron - I’ve never seen anyone do that in my entire life. That’s hilarious!