Another post on Welcoming, as we are exploring what happens when someone comes to our church (community) for the first time. It is a daunting prospect, new people, new language … but how can we help people get drawn into our community. We’re following the story of a (fictional) person turning up at our Sunday gathering for the first time. Comments are welcome and appreciated, from members of our church or otherwise.
Well, your friend did eventually turn up, and you realised that, like any party, “start at ten” means come some time after ten. But, by the end of the event you had met some new people that seemed really interested in you … somehow they managed to make you feel that they were enjoying meeting you. You’d got two invitations back to other things that were happening, and while you weren’t sure quite what would happen there, you knew that you would not feel out of it … at least, not if these new friends had anything to do with it.
That was the first of a whole new journey which redefined what you thought about church, and … a bit later … Jesus. In fact, it was the start of a journey into finding your place in the church community. A month later, you feel that some of those initial friends were rather like doors … opening into a whole new community. One person seemed to lead to another, and now you are beginning to belong in this new circle of friends.
Why did it work? The Welcome Table at the back didn’t appear in this story, and neither did rotas or smiley badges. No new visitor form, to be followed up by a pastoral team. Just people, after a shakey start in this case, kicking in and drawing the new visitor in and befriending them.
What we are looking at is how to make the organic approach work better, and also to put a parallel system in place underneath this to try to ensure that new members are drawn in. Do you have any ideas about how this would work?
What about having a picture gallery of all of us, on a couple of the MDF boards? Perhaps also doing this for us grouped into cells? Or getting more pics into the online directory … or are we pressuring people too much? What about more weekends and social functions? Book a hostel and go to Loch Ossian, or Comrie, or New Lanark for the weekend? Or just leave it as it is?
Post written by Neil Duguid as part of this series. Other posts: Part 1, 2, & 3.
I have been offline for a while and have just been able to click on here and read all this church welcoming stuff, love it, one of my biggest barriers to coming back to God was being able to walk into a church, it was hard, and I think every church needs to look at itself, what is amazing is we all still do things the same, reception areas with someone giving out bits of paper, welcome teams and bands doing soundchecks, the moulds need breaking. It is about family, friendship and the life, whats going on!