Welcoming 2 – Getting them through the door

This is part 2 of a series on welcoming people into our church community.  We are exploring what is working well, and what we can do to improve what we are doing.  If you are part of our community, we would love your comments.  If you aren’t part of our church, any comments that can help us would be appreciated too!  These posts have been written collaboratively by Brian Donaldson, Neil Duguid and the team…

Jon Birch has a gift for seeing the church as others see us. His cartoons at asbojesus are witty, and probably sometimes upsetting to many in different parts of the church. But have you walked around Edinburgh looking at church noticeboards and wondering whether to go there on a Sunday? Most of them do not impress! The doors are shut, and when they are open on a Sunday, the lobby area is designed like a public toilet … so that you can’t see in from outside.

How do we present ourselves to others? Our usual answer is to say that we are the church, and we present it to out friends and community. So then we can make excuses about the other things, that they really don’t matter so much. Like:

• Our advertising … I was looking for cinema times and saw the Google Ad for one of our other city churches. Full marks to them.
• Our website … is it clear, informative and appealing?
• The outside of the building. What will go through the mind of the passenger on the bus stuck in the traffic outside? OK, we don’t have those inane Wayside Pulpit messages. Neither, although we are big on the bible, do we have a big bible text, probably looking rather condemning when taken out of context. But what do we have? Not a lot.

In other words, the whole issue of external communications fits here. Just because what is inside is what matters, do we ignore the outer face?

What would you like to see us do? And can you help us do it?