Engaging with guests at your church on Sunday mornings can feel slightly out of your comfort zone on a good day, and exceptionally awkward on a bad one. Whether you’re an introvert or extrovert, a great conversationalist or quiet as a mouse, you’ve probably experienced the frustration of interacting with guests at your church on at least one occasion. You want to talk to them, but you feel like you’re trying too hard and you don’t want to be inauthentic.
Interacting with guests and visitors can be hard if there isn’t a plan in place that guides your church towards doing it well.
Of course, interacting with people doesn’t need to be formulaic. Maybe you’re put-off by the idea of creating systems, schedules, and plans around interacting with your visitors. You may think, “It’s easier to just let organic interaction happen!” And we get it. The more organic interaction can happen, the better! But the truth is that without a plan in place, those visitors may never even speak to you, and you would never know it.
Being intentional about serving the guests who come through your doors, whether you have 10s or 100s of them, is one of the most important ways your body of believers can love the community around you.
Here are some tips for how your church can thoughtfully engage with the guests who walk through your doors on Sunday mornings:
1. Give them touch points
A visitor at your church will likely decide whether or not they’re going to come back within their first 10 minutes of arriving. That means that genuinely welcoming your visitors from the moment they show up is crucial to their decision to come worship with you again! Whether you do this through a parking lot greeting team, door greeters, a welcome table, or all of the above, there are so many ways to establish a positive experience for your guests when they show up to visit.
2. Follow up
Following up with visitors doesn’t have to mean hounding them to come to each and every event you’re putting on for the next year at the church, or making them uncomfortable with your over-enthusiasm. It does mean that you give them opportunities to connect with the church, and that you follow up accordingly.
You can give them a welcome form to fill out, a QR code to scan for an online form, or even an opportunity to attend a “visitor dinner” with other new church attendees once they’ve visited more than once or twice. If your guests show interest in connecting further with your church (by filling out a form, for example), have a plan for a church leader to send them a handwritten note, or find another personal touchpoint to let your guest know they’re seen and wanted.
3. Be open about your mission
Putting on a facade with visitors is the best way to create problems down the road. Genuinely sharing the mission of your church from day one will help your guests understand what your church cares about, and discern whether it’s a good fit. This is one way you can extend kindness to your guests – no smoke and mirrors, just honest conversations about what your church values, and why.
If a visitor hears your mission and decides they want to move on (say they want to be involved in supporting international missionaries, but your church has a larger local mission focus), it’s better for them to make that decision up front than years down the road.
4. Track patterns
Lists and data aren’t the first thing that comes to mind when people think about church guest services – but having a basic plan in place to understand your effectiveness can be a game changer. You don’t want guests for the sake of having guests, but to get them plugged in for the sake of the Gospel. If your guests services team is working week in and week out but not accomplishing their goal, that’s when some things need to change.
Based on welcome forms that are turned in, you can keep a simple list of who has visited your church, and then periodically track whether they’re still attending. If they’ve stopped attending, you can dig a bit further to see if a particular event or service correlates with a larger number drop-off. This practice will help you and your team be ever-improving as you serve those around you.
At the end of the day, serving your guests doesn’t have to be complicated. This work is about truly serving the people who walk through your doors, not about making your church look good. Pursuing guests so that they feel welcomed, loved, valued, and safe is the end goal for every visitor who walks through your church doors. We hope these tools will give you some new ideas for how to make your guest services ministry an integral part of a positive Sunday morning experience.
