EvangelismCoach.org» Grow Your Church 20 Percent – By The Numbers

Grow Your Church 20 Percent – By The Numbers

EvangelismCoach — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 12:52:33 +0000

Want to grow your church attendance by 20% this year?

I once coached a church that set that as their goal. Is it realistic?

Visitors are the key to growing your church.

Without keeping visitors, your church will not grow, nor will it replace the members who drop out, move, or die.

The key to keeping visitors is helping them decide to come back and connect with your congregation.

Assumptions

I’m assuming your church is

healthy
making disciples,
helping people mature in their faith.
helping people find some place to belong
serving its community.

Those are all factors in growing your church. We also know that the church is a spiritual organization and there are lots of spiritual influences involved in the growth of a church. Today’s focus on numbers doesn’t take away from any of that.

The point here, is let’s do the math of growing your church by 20%.

This is where I wanted to help the church I coached see if this was a realistic number.

Do the math

20% is a huge growth rate, so let’s look at it using some of the commonly available statistics about church visitors.

Some of the statistics may have changed since they were published. This more of an example of the math involved.

For this example, current attendance is 100 people a week.

To grow your church 20%, you’ll want 120 by the end of the year.

1. How many second time visitors does a church keep?

An old statistic suggests that churches can keep 85% of second time visitors who come back the week immediately after their first visit.

To grow this congregation 20%, they will need to have 23 first time visitors come back immediately the 2nd week.

Question: What are you doing to help people decide to come back a second consecutive week?

2. How many people need to visit your church for the first time?

Another commonly quoted statistic is that churches only get 1 to 2 out of 10 visitors to come back a second week.

For this congregation of 100 to grow to 20%, they will need to have 115-230 first time visitors during the year.

Question: Is that an achievable number in 1 year?

If they can increase that percentage to 3 out of every 10, they only need 76 first time vistors to get 23 to come back for a second time.

See what happens if you can increase the number of 1st time visitors who come back for week 2?

Suggested areas of focus

Do the math for your congregation.

Question: What can you do increase the % of first time church visitors come back the second week?

In looking at the system of helping first time visitors connect with your congregation there are plenty of variables and places you can focus.

Greeters
Ushers
Welcome process
Quality of the service
Getting contact information
Followup contact after the first visit
Easy connections to build relationships

Each area can be improved to help you increase the number of people who stay with your congregation.

Likewise, the level of impact that your preaching, education, children’s ministry, your church’s mission, and worship all come into play as well.

People will invest their time where they find growth, significance, and a place to serve.

Does your church provide that as a community?

Source: Grow Your Church 20 Percent – By The Numbers

EvangelismCoach.org strives to inform pastors, elders, and church leaders on trends, tools, and resources regarding evangelism in the 21st century. Visit our blog at www.EvangelismCoach.org for more great articles and resources. We invite you to forward this along to your colleagues who may benefit from our ministry

Church Greeters have more impact than they think

EvangelismCoach — Sat, 07 Aug 2010 13:31:28 +0000

Do your church greeters realize that simply saying a hello on a Sunday morning can have long term consequences?

Sometimes to a second generation?

The impact of a well-trained church greeter who says hello to your church visitors on a Sunday morning goes a whole lot further than your greeter might realize.

Read on to see some of the impact that a wise greeter can have.

This is an edited sample of Chapter 2 from Church Greeters 101. Order your copy below.

_________________________________________________________

What do people remember about visiting your church?

One night over dinner, I heard this story firsthand from a Hispanic immigrant who had experienced the transforming grace of Christ. He had begun looking for a church for his family. He told me:

I had only been a Christian for six months. We moved from [another city] and began to look for a Spanish language church. I didn’t find any for a few weeks, so my wife and I decided to attend an English language congregation.

We arrived and sat down in the pews, clearly the stranger. We didn’t speak English at the time, so we really had no clue as to what was happening. When the service was over, all the people began leaving.

We stood around, and guess what? No one talked to us.

The only thing my friend only remembers about that church six years later is that no one said hello.

Imagine your experience if you walked into a church for the first time and no one greeted you.

If you were the first time visitor, imagine no one answering your questions about where is the rest room, or where do you take your children. Imagine no one to point out who to talk to with the spiritual need that drew you to church today. Imagine the feeling of noticing the congregation seems to ignore you.

If you were a regular attender or member, imagine that you have had a really awful week. Imagine no one is at the door to even notice the burden you carry and offer to pray with you. Imagine that no one even notices that your countenance that suggests you have come to church with a need.

Imagine for a moment that a life crisis has hit and you have not been physically or emotionally able to attend church for a few weeks. Imagine that no one notices that you have been “missing.”

Imagine walking into such a church. It would feel cold. You would feel out of place, and you would likely feel that no one cares. If this was your first visit, you would not likely return for a second or third time.

Before any worship service begins, the work of your effective greeters helps your first time visitors and members feel welcome into the house of God.

Why bother with Greeters?

Some churches I’ve consulted with can’t seem to recruit enough volunteers, people drop out after one or two weeks, some don’t ever want to do it again, and some church haven’t even started a greeting ministry. I hear stuff like

I can’t find anyone to serve.
There are not enough volunteers.
I don’t know how to talk to a visitor.
Getting volunteers to take the plunge.
We don’t do it because it’s everyone’s job.
People say yes, but don’t show up for duty.
I’m afraid that we will mess up God’s work in someone’s life.

With all the challenges to recruiting and training greeters, we come to the question of why bother?

Why put up with the organizational efforts and human resources it takes to manage such a challenge?

Why spend hours of volunteer effort and energy to recruit, train, and equip greeters?

Why bother?

No church wants to unintentionally give a visitor or member
a bad experience, nor feelings of being unwanted or unwelcomed.

No church wants to be rude
and hinder a family’s journey of faith to Christ.

The potential long reach of a hello

Here is one from a family who dropped out of church over 40 years ago because no one said hello:

Over a good meal one night with an irreligious married couple, we spoke of church life, faith, Christ, and other topics. They both attended church 3 times a week growing up, but once they married and relocated to another city, they quit going.

They hadn’t been to church regularly for nearly 40 years and faith is no longer important to them. Their children weren’t church goers and grew up without any real knowledge of the grace of God.

I asked, “Why did you stop going?”

“When we were newly married,” they replied, “we relocated hundreds of miles away from our home town, away from family, friends, and our support network.

“We visited a few churches of our brand and not one person said hello or took interest in us.”

Did you catch that? A generation of children grew up into adulthood in an irreligious household because the parents couldn’t find a church where they felt welcomed. One child became a Christian later in life, thanks to the saving grace of Christ.

Greeters have more impact than they think

Greeters serve in quiet but vital roles. They make sure the church is ready for the service. They make sure to greet members and visitors and all the children as they arrive. Ushers help people to their seat and answer any last minute questions that visitors may have thought of.

Greeters and ushers may continue to serve during the worship service, helping the latecomers get situated, or even ministering to those who may have quietly stepped out into the hall to find some space.

As people leave the worship experience, greeters are there to give a final greeting and an invitation to return again.

First impressions are not about right doctrine, but about the emotional and relational experiences that a person has with your congregation.

Potential Spiritual Impact

I received this note in my email. The writer is a high school friend and refers to events nearly 20 years ago when she was forced to go to church as a very troubled teenager. She reflects on influences that helped her come to her own faith in Christ as an adult.

It started with my parents forcing me into the car and forcing me out of the car every single Sunday. I sat on the back table and didn’t participate or anything….really because I could NOT believe in something I couldn’t see.

Yet there was this one guy who kept coming up, every single week, to say hi, give me a hug, etc…..and even though I thought it was strange, I thought there must be something at work here…so I started listening more….then I actually started praying….then I actually started looking forward to the youth group and the fellowship with my peers. . .

Then I started seeing people who really believed and were not only believers, but were willing to share, no matter how long it took, with someone totally outside the sphere of believers….totally awesome….so……thank you.

Did you notice the power of a greeter in her story and journey to faith? She experienced a greeting and kindness that eventually influenced her into finding faith in Christ.

________________________________________________________________

Order your copy of Church Greeters 101 here.

Source: Church Greeters have more impact than they think

6 Steps to Organize an Invite a Friend Day

EvangelismCoach — Tue, 03 Aug 2010 12:22:06 +0000

A reader contacted me: “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 further 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.

1. Build a base of prayer.

Encourage people to pray for this particular Sunday
Have people write down names of potential guests on a card and pray daily.
Ask God for opportunities to invite people.
Read 10 ways to pray for more invitations.

2. Build momentum.

Make an announcement each week.
Pastors: talk about your personal invitations to others.
Cast vision for hospitality and welcome
Prepare marketing materials your people can give away.
Read Refreshing a Vision for Church Hospitality

3. Update / Review your hospitality systems.

Cast a fresh vision for your greeters and ushers of welcoming the church visitor.
Give your building / meeting space a fresh review for cleanliness and presentation.
Review your method to get visitor contact information.
Update your visitor follow-up process to current information.
Read Review your Church Hospitality Ministries

4. Give people tools to invite their friends.

Distribute invitation cards
Distribute flyers.
They can share with their networks like Facebook.
Give people online tools to share with their networks.
Update your webpage to feature the sermon series.
(Read Business Card Outreach Idea for Church Members).

5. Launch a sermon series that day.

Launch a 3-4 week sermon series around a life problem.
Use the series to show the Bible is relevant to life.
Give opportunity for people to respond to the gospel message.
Foreshadow the next installment to increase the possibility of a return visit.
Lift up opportunities for people to build new friendships or give themselves away in service.

6. Have a follow-up “meet the pastor” type event.

Prepare a social event within a few weeks of the first Sunday.
Invite your guests to that event.
Showcase the mission of the church and its involvement in the neighborhood.
Invite people to serve in the community.

Our story:

These were the steps we followed in the launch of our day in May 2010.

We had prayer going, 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 invitations went forth.

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.

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.

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.

Source: 6 Steps to Organize an Invite a Friend Day

Thoughts of a First Time Church Visitor

EvangelismCoach — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 11:55:01 +0000

Check out this video (the volume on the final credit page gets really loud. . .. )

Video: [Thoughts of a Church Visitor]

I found this video this morning while preparing for a workshop in Richmond VA.

It captures the private thoughts of a first time church visitor as they prepare to come to your church.

If you have a church hospitality committee or welcome committee of some kind, consider using this video in your training.

Discuss

What can your greeters do to help this visitor feel safe?
What can your pastor do to help this visitor feel welcome?
What can your church members do to help this visitor feel welcome?
What are some steps you can take to expect and meet this visitors potential need?

Share your thoughts in the comments below. . .

I’ve got a new product just released, it’s a digital download on conduction a hospitality review.

25 Factors That Shape Visitor Perceptions About Church

EvangelismCoach — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 11:11:56 +0000

Today’s Guest Article is from Steve Fogg: Clear and Simple. He is a blogger from Australia, focused on communications and PR for churches. I first found Steve through a Blog Carnival on OurChurch.com

While I’m away on vacation, there will be a few guests posts this week.

There are many factors that influence a visitors perception about your church.

These perceptions influence them before they visit your church, or whether they should return again.

Every point below can either help or hinder their decision making process regarding whether they should stick around for one more week:

Website
Signage (I once saw a church sign that said Merry Christmas! on the top line and ‘Turn or burn’ on the 2nd line. Sigh)
Printed collateral
Greeters/Ushers
Anchor in a service
What other people (or churches) tell your friend about your church.
What denomination you belong to
If you aren’t closely linked into a denomination, what does that mean?
Their perception of “church” or Christians in general
Coffee (very important in Melbourne)
Friendly
You/they listened to me.
What they think about you, or the person who is inviting them.
What they think about the highest profile person in the church (If they are from a churched background)
Receptionist (Yes, they are an ambassador of your church)
How you talk about “them” when they visit you. Do you talk as though they aren’t in the room?
Invitation to a morning tea/lunch/dinner by a member of your congregation
You/the church talks to them, not at them.
Church name
Your advertising
Facility (A facility can shape your perception of an organisation when you walk into it)
Language – do you use inclusive language that they understand? or do you use exclusive language which only insiders get?
What you believe – sounds obvious, but it’s a big deal for those from a faith background.
A person from your church or your church helped them in some way.
The speaker

My point is this. Every touchpoint shapes a visitors perception positively or negatively.

Are you in credit or in debit?

What barriers would you add?

What would help?

Want more of Steve?
Follow Steve on Twitter
Say G’day on Facebook
Subscribe to RSS

Source: 25 Factors That Shape Visitor Perceptions About Church

Regularly Evaluate Your Hospitality Ministry

EvangelismCoach — Sat, 03 Jul 2010 12:27:39 +0000

Wise church leaders will regularly evaluate their church hospitality program.

Later this month, I will help two churches evaluate their church hospitality ministry as they prepare to welcome new guests this fall.

Summer is perfect time

The summer months in the United States are traditionally a slower season of church programming and activities.

But, it’s also a great time to prepare and plan for the fall launch of new programming, new sermon series, and new initiatives.

Most of our churches in the US can experience a renewed cycle of growth in September as families return from summer travel and schools start up again.

Why Evaluate Your Church’s Hospitality Ministry

New visitors will come this fall. New families will have moved into the neighborhood and will be looking for a church.

Is your church hospitality still running in tip-top shape to welcome and receive new visitors?

Are your church hospitality processes flowing smoothly, or is stuff falling through the cracks?

Inertia and inefficiency always creep in to systems, and churches are no different.

Your systems and processes for your church’s hospitality can always be improved, and decaying systems can be refreshed.

When to Evaluate Your Church’s Hospitality System

I suggest doing an in depth church hospitality evaluation quarterly.

If you are launching some big event like a sermon series that is designed to increase the number of first time visitors, you might want to do one a few weeks ahead of time. Back up a few weeks from that Sunday and schedule an evaluation of your church’s hospitality system.

You might also choose to do a brief church hospitality review each week as part of your worship planning.

I know of several churches that review their past service each week and do a quick review of how things went hospitality wise. Takes no more than 2-3 minutes to do a mental sweep to see if something caught your attention, or the attention of your volunteers, that needs to be fixed.

As part of a regular in-depth evaluation of their hospitality ministry, wise hospitality ministry leaders will

Review their facility navigation
Review their current facility appearance.
Review their church visitor follow-up process.
Review their status of current hospitality ministries
Review their current church greeter process / volunteers
Review their process to how they get church visitor contact information.

Doing this kind of in depth evaluation of your church’s hospitality will often reveal a bunch of

We need to fix this.
We ought-a
We should have . . .

Example of a evaluation of hospitality ministry

In a church hospitality coaching conversation, I led a leader in thinking through various areas related to the visitor experience.

I somewhat followed a flowchart in chapter 7 of my e-book on How to Welcome Church Visitors.

The Fruit of Evaluating Your Hospitality Ministry

One fruit of the review is to discover areas of potential friction (that which makes your visitors feel uneasy, or even your volunteers feel uneasy) and remove it.

This review simply removed some rough edges that might make a visitor feel confused, disoriented, or a little uneasy.

Now, their solutions won’t magically keep new visitors.

It was an area of incremental improvement.

By taking the time (that conversation lasted about 1 hour) to do a review, this leader had several action steps of incremental improvement.

Each time your team evaluates your hospitality ministry, it is a chance to:

Tweak what has broken
Think of what might be missing and provide it
Think of how to improve your welcome and greeter process.

New Resource

I’ve recorded a 1 hour long seminar on doing a hospitality review, now available by instant download after purchase. . . It’s MP3 format for, and priced at $9.97.

It is an overview of the entire system, plus some vision casting for hospitality ministries, but can be a helpful guide to evaluate your hospitality ministry.

As with our products, there is a 30 day money back guarantee. No hassle refunds.

Source: Regularly Evaluate Your Hospitality Ministry

Personal Evangelism Substitute #2: Hospitality

EvangelismCoach — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 13:28:16 +0000

Today is part two of a series on four substitutes for Evangelism. To be sure to get the next parts, choose one of the subscription options via RSS Feed, Twitter, or Facebook. (This material is covered briefly on disk #1 in my Fear Free Evangelism Seminar CD set coming later this month).

This may sound funny coming from me, because I write so much on this topic (and even sell two ebooks). But as I’ve consulted with churches, I run into this substitute regularly.

Personal Evangelism Substitute #2: Church Hospitality Ministry.

In many churches, we have substituted evangelism for the nicety of saying “Hello” at a church on Sunday and we call that evangelism.

Many churches have an “Evangelism Committee” that is focused on the church coffee hour and assimilation of newcomers.

Some committees are expanded to include church marketing efforts. (By the way, What does an Evangelism Committee do?)

But Christian hospitality on a Sunday morning is not personal evangelism.

Your hospitality ministries support the evangelistic work of the church, but it is not evangelism.

Rather, your hospitality creates the space where evangelism can occur, much like Starbucks has created the third space for life conversations to occur.

The Definition of Christian Hospitality

I define Christian hospitality as

Taking the initiative to welcome others and

inviting others to share in our community life.

This extends beyond our group gatherings for worship but a welcome in:

our small groups
our families
our home
our lives

This definition is much broader than evangelism.

It speaks to

Our small group life,
Our corporate worship life
How we treat other people in general
How connected we feel to the local church body
How we get along as members of the body of Christ,
The potential depths of our relationship with one another.

Two different goals.

In my ebook on hospitality (How to Welcome Church Visitors) I write:

Evangelism seeks conversion and repentance and deals with salvation and faith.

Hospitality seeks a repeat visit and to help the person connect to the fellowship.

The focus of evangelism is a changed life, while the focus of hospitality is to create a first impression.

These are entirely different goals. They’re mutually supportive, but they’re not a substitute one for the other.

The place for Church Hospitality Committees

Churches should have hospitality committees that oversee the various welcoming functions of the church, but this work is not personal evangelism.

The art of welcoming church visitors is a key component in helping a church fulfill its evangelistic partnership with its members.

Your church members should be confident that their invitees will be warmly welcomed in the midst of a group of strangers.

Your members should be so proud of the welcome that your church gives that it naturally fosters personal invitations.

A hospitality team will oversee all that: reception, greeters and tweaking the system to leave your guests feeling like that they’ve had a great visit.

Your hospitality committee should do at least a quarterly review of your church hospitality systems.

Let me ask you this?

What is the actual role of your church’s evangelism committee?

How can your committee take a more active role in encouraging personal evangelism in the church?

Parts 3 and 4 in the series will come out later this week. To be sure to get the next parts, choose one of the subscription options via RSS Feed, Twitter, or Facebook.

Source: Personal Evangelism Substitute #2: Hospitality

Books on Church Hospitality

EvangelismCoach — Wed, 02 Jun 2010 13:30:04 +0000

One common question that I’m asked is for a recommended reading list on books related to church hospitality.

I’ve compiled this based on the reading that I’ve done.

The Church Hospitality e-books I’ve written:

Church Greeters 101

Church Greeters 101 is an instant download after purchase.

This ebook focuses on growing a greeting ministry from scratch:

Organizing,
Recruiting, and
training, and
keeping Church Greeters.

A big emphasis here is on ongoing training of greeters and gives specific examples of greeter training meetings.

How to Welcome Church Visitors:

How to Welcome Church Visitors , is also instantly downloadable.

This is my first ebook on Creating better first impressions.

It looks at the entire visitor experience of the process of a first time Church Visitor.

Visit the sales website directly at http://www.WelcomeChurchVisitors.com

Other church hospitality books available from Amazon

Beyond the First Visit: The Complete Guide to Connecting Guests to Your Church , Gary McIntosh
Fusion: Turning First-Time Guests into Fully-Engaged Members of Your Church , Nelson Searcy
First Impressions: Creating Wow Experiences In Your Church , Mark Waltz
Serving as a Church Greeter , Leslie Parrott (Review )
The Work of the Greeter , Paige Lanier Chargois
Welcome to Our Church , Annette Schroeder
Ushering 101 , Buddy Bell
Greeting 101 , Buddy Bell

All those above are affiliate links. I get a small commission that Amazon sends me.

Let me ask you this?

Are there other church hospitality books that you would recommend? Add them below and I invite you to give a reason for that recommendation.

Source: Books on Church Hospitality

Why is it so hard to be a church visitor?

EvangelismCoach — Wed, 12 May 2010 12:42:55 +0000

I read a newsletter some time ago (source lost) that described what it is like to be a church visitor:

Why is it so difficult to walk into a new church?

Even if you’ve been steeped in church culture for years, being in an unfamiliar environment is unsettling.

If you get there a few minutes early, you awkwardly sit by yourself while people around you catch up on each other’s news.

If you get there a few minutes late, you have to go through the painful ordeal of finding a seat while everyone else is already standing to sing, or worse, sitting down and watching you walk down the aisle.

You stumble through the service feeling inept, trying to decipher the hymnal from the chorus book, then realize that all the music is printed at the back of your bulletin anyway.

You try to follow the sermon without being too critical and try to forget how it’s different from the church you left behind.

You try to worship without distractions, but it’s hard.

And then there’s the visitor who has never been inside a church before.

Magnify that out-of-place feeling by one hundred.

My Personal Experience of Being a church visitor

In the past 4 years, I’ve had the chance to be a first time visitor in lots of different churches.

I travel and speak around the US and Latin America and it gives me a chance to visit.

Here are two experiences of my first time visit:

Recently, we’ve been attending a church for the last six weeks or so, while we are preparing our own church for its launch.

They have two critical elements to growing a church (see this post: Only Two Things grow a church).

But even after 6 weeks, no one has said hello to us.

That makes it very hard to keep going, even though we know we won’t stay connected when we launch our new congregation.

Think like a first time church visitor

When you review your hospitality ministries and your first guest experience, think like a church visitor.

Church visitors have a variety of needs, variety of different reactions, but two common factors to nearly all first time church visitors is

Spatial anxiety – not knowing where anything is or how anything is done in your church.
Social anxiety – will I fit in, will these people like me, do I have a place to serve.

Maybe because I teach on this stuff, I am aware of my emotions when I enter a strange place.

I’ve made notes about typical questions that I ask, what I look for, and have grown these observations into a full fledged e-book that I sell at How to Welcome Church Visitors.

In that e-book, I help churches evaluate their church hospitality systems from parking lot to the pew.

One of the critical exercises is to develop empathy for the first time visitor in your midst. By developing that empathy, you will see things that you can fix in your own church.

Let me ask you this?

What are some ways you can develop empathy or an emotional awareness for your first time church visitor?

How can you change some of your hospitality practices to calm those emotional responses?

Source: Why is it so hard to be a church visitor?

How to Say the Welcome Greeting at a church

EvangelismCoach — Tue, 11 May 2010 15:50:38 +0000

Imagine that you are a lay person in your congregation (many of you are).

Your pastor calls you on Thursday and says

We are preparing the church bulletin.

Would you like to be our liturgist and give the welcome speech on Sunday?

Your heart races, the mouth goes dry. You think:

Me? I have to say something in front of all those people?

But since you want to

please the pastor, or
volunteer you time, or
practice good church hospitality because you know its the right thing to do,

you suspend your fear for just a moment and say yes.

How do I say a welcome at church?

When you hang up the phone its a race to Google and type in something like:

How to Say the Welcome at/in Church
How can I say a/the welcome in a church
How do you say a church welcome at church functions
How to do church greeting
How to give a welcome address in the church
How to give welcome address for church visitors

I know, because this question and variants are common for my website and in my coaching practice. I was surprised by the number of queries asked of me, so let me give you some tips.

5 Tips to Prepare the Welcome Speech at Church

1. There is no magic formula to a church welcome speech.

I wish I could give you a script. I’m often asked for a script. You might even be looking for sample welcome speeches to give at church.

But churches are so unique, each church visitor is unique, every person who does this unique, and every worship service is unique.

Even the location of the greeting is so unique to every church. Some give this welcome greeting at the beginning of the service, others in the middle in relationship to their connection card, and others at the very end after the worship is over.

What you will say in your welcome speech at church is dependent on lots of other variables.

2. To design a welcome speech, think like a first time church visitor.

Once first time church visitors get to the sanctuary and are participating in the worship service, first time church visitors have common questions.

Will I fit in here with this group of people?
Is this a place where I can serve?
How do I get more information about this church?
Will this place help me grow in my relationship with God?

Depending on where your welcome or greeting speech for visitors is located in the service, you may want to address one or two of those typical questions.

3. Typical parts of a church welcome speech

Your welcome speech doesn’t have to be long at all.

Most church welcome speeches start with some kind of acknowledgment or appreciation of the visitor’s presence.

If you are here for the first time today, we’re glad you are here.
We want to give a special welcome to our first time visitors today.

Some may then move on to address a potential fear in the mind of a church visitor at this point. For example

We won’t make you stand up if you don’t want to . . . .
We want to give you space to be as anonymous as you want . . .

Some may then move on to how to learn more. For example

We invite you to visit the welcome center.
If you’ll raise your hand, the ushers will give you a welcome packet that we’ve prepared just for you.
If you’ll fill out your connection card, we’d love to send you a gift.

Some move into an invitation to some volunteer mission work or connection point that is upcoming.

We are building houses for Habitat this next Saturday and we invite you to come and serve with us and meet more people who might just be the ones to help you grow in your faith.
This Friday, we’re having a newcomers gathering at the pastors house. Come and meet new people and get some of your questions answered.

4. Invite them to join your church’s mission

That last part is a big deal for me.

I don’t know about you, but the generic “we are here to serve you” speech falls on my deaf ears.

I find that the more and more I hear that, the less I pay attention.

Why?

“I don’t know how the church can serve me. I know nothing about it. I don’t know their programs, I don’t know their people. They don’t know me.”

What catches my attention is the church’s mission and programming.

What is your church’s unique mission and how are you expressing that in your programing in the next few weeks.

Think like a visitor.

What would motivate you to explore more of the church’s programming / service

We are here to serve you.
We are building houses for Habitat this next Saturday and you are invited to come serve with us.

You don’t need to cover every announcement every week, but pick one program expression that you want to invite people to.

This is simply suggesting a next step in a first time church visitors process of connecting with your church.

5. Cover your visitor welcome speech with Prayer.

As you prepare your welcome greeting, pray for your part in the service.

Your part is one of many that the Lord may choose to use in helping people make another step of growth in their spiritual journey.

If you are a layperson, pray that the Lord will give you the right words for that particular crowd on that particular worship service on that particular day.

Let me ask you this?

What advice would you give to someone who is nervous about composing or giving a church welcome speech? Use the comment field below

Source: How to Say the Welcome Greeting at a church