Driving Away Visitors

I meant to blog about Thom Rainer’s survey of how churches drive away visitors, but hadn’t gotten to it. Now that Chris Thompson mentioned it in a recent ADN blog, so now I’m finally blogging it. I won’t quote the whole article, but here are some impressions I took from it, and my early evaluation about how we might respond.

Having a stand up and greet one another time in the worship service. This response was my greatest surprise for two reasons. First, I was surprised how much guests are really uncomfortable during this time. Second, I was really surprised that it was the most frequent response.

I was surprised that the greeting time makes guests uncomfortable, since it’s a part of the service at some churches that seem pretty guest-friendly. We have one, but not as a welcoming device at the beginning of the service. Instead we give it a theological spin as the passing of the peace. In light of how uncomfortable it makes our guests, we should give some thought to how important it is.

Unsafe and unclean children’s area. … If your church does not give a high priority to children, don’t expect young families to attend.

We are working on it, but this is truly one of the areas where we can always be improving.

No place to get information.

This is why we have 400 words of boilerplate information on the back of our Sunday bulletin. I’d like to have more things people can take away. My top two priorities are: a brochure about the church with lots of color pictures, and a brochure about our mission partnerships with lots of color pictures. As an introvert myself, I also want us to have a visitor booth where people can go chat up a single volunteer, instead of having to plunge into the crowd of fellowship time.

Bad church website.

It’s been awhile since I did much with this. I need to raise it in my priorities. I’d like to get more people to visit our Facebook page as well.

Members telling guests that they were in their seat or pew.

Regular attenders need to be aware that if I find out this happens at JLP, I’m going to call them out by name during each of the next three worship services. Or maybe three dozen. By the time they feel safe returning, no one will remember it was “their” seat.