Making visitors feel welcome is an ongoing challenge for most churches. Charles Arn is president of Church Growth Inc., where he has invested a lot of energy into understanding how visitors respond to different congregations. Our very own Rachel Willoughby spoke with him about how churches should engage newcomers.
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." Those friends and relatives are critical to the growth of churches. They far outweigh factors like the facilities, music, preaching, or children's ministry–people may stay because of these things, but they come because someone they knew invited them.
Once visitors come, how do you engage them in a way that's genuine?
Make conversations happen. In the focus groups we've conducted, most visitors said that their decision to come back was based on the friendliness of the church. The words "friendly" and "friendliness" kept coming up, much more so than "theology," "location," "preaching," or anything else. So we asked, "How did you decide that this was a friendly church or not?" And they said, "The number of people who talked to me."
So if you want to write it in an equation:
friendly church = many conversations
unfriendly church = few or no conversations
That's probably reliant upon the congregation themselves…
It's 95 percent reliant upon the congregation. A good church will have greeters at the front door, and they'll smile and give a bulletin or a handshake, which is nice. But I was reading a book the other day–Attracting New Members by Bob Bast–where he makes an interesting comment. He says:
Greeters fill an important function before the service. Even so, their friendliness is seen as part of their job. The welcome of one individual member who comes up to the visitor to greet him or her on their own will have more impact than the most gracious welcome of an official greeter.
So it really is up to the folks sitting in the pews to take the initiative and go up and introduce themselves to newcomers.
We also asked the focus groups when they decided that the church was friendly or not. From the answers we got, there's a ten-minute window that is pregnant with opportunities for a church to make a good impression. And it wasn't the ten minutes I expected.
I thought they would say it was right after they got out of the car and walked into the building, but more than any other time, folks said, "I decided this was a friendly church in the ten minutes following the conclusion of the service." Many feel that that is the first time people are free to be themselves.
Up until that point, you go through the routine and enter the sanctuary and follow the directions. But when the last song is sung and the last prayer is prayed, then it's a free-for-all, and in the minds of the visitors, they're asking, "Will these people really go out of their way to welcome newcomers like me?"
What should churches do in light of that?
What we suggest to churches now is to have after-service hosts. This is not just a greeter who stands at the door and shakes peoples' hands on the way out. These are people in the sanctuary whose ministry begins when the last prayer ends. Their job is to look for people that they don't recognize, go up and introduce themselves, and act as a host, introducing them to the pastor, inviting them to the coffee table, and really–in the sense that we often think of the word "host"–to be a host.
Language is important here. Churches that are really sensitive to the newcomer use the word "guest" rather than "visitor," and they'll often also replace "greeter" with "host." The whole dynamic, then, is not of a visitor who is coming to inspect a particular place and a greeter who is supposed to smile, but it's really an interaction between guests and hosts, just as you would entertain people in your home.
When you're hosting, you go out of your way to engage guests in conversation, introduce them to others, take their coats, and show them different places that might be of interest. Churches that can build that guest/host relationship in the congregation will find good things happening after the service.
Also, in our research we've found that most people think that their church is a friendly church, and they assume that most newcomers will feel the same way. But that's probably not the case. One pastor we spoke with asked six of his lay leaders to visit another church that they'd never been to before, one that had a different style of worship or was of a different denomination. He asked them to jot down their impressions and whether they would go back again and why or why not. And then the pastor asked them to give a report at an all-church meeting.
It was a great experience, not only for those who went out and visited, but also for the people who were listening to the report. Those leaders who went out became visitors for the first time in a long time, and all of a sudden they remembered how uncomfortable it could be. I'm sure the churches they visited thought they were friendly churches, too.
The best way to help people learn is to help them experience. When you can put them in the shoes of a visitor and experience that, it beats all the finger-pointing and hand-waving in the world.
