I found myself cringing, as I recognised how excruciating is can be for people who are not used to church culture, arriving in something that anyone who has been around church for more than a few years gets immune to!

I had an interesting experience, going to a 4 day coaching events for the business world, which is not a world I have any real experience of at all.  There were about 15 of us in total, including some very high flyers from some very well known and large businesses and multinationals.  As they described their work and world, they might as well have been talking Greek as far as I was concerned – I just didn’t understand the language.  When they explained what they meant, I actually understood what they were talking about, but is very easy to feel that you are not part of the "in crowd" or to feel a bit stupid because you don’t understand what everyone else seems to.  I wonder how often people feel like that when the come to church (any church, whatever your tradition!) for the first time?

I was invited to another such course, in a couple of weeks time.  I felt that familiar tingle of anxiety, as I thought about being in such an unfamiliar environment.  Maybe that is a regular feeling for people as they wake up on a Sunday morning and contemplate entering our unfamiliar environment of church?

What do you think?  What was your reaction on watching this video?

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.

OK. You’ve never been before, but your friend persuaded you … great music, doughnuts … and now you find yourself walking up the steps. Your friend is somewhere inside, and your only thought is to find that welcome face.

The steward gives you a sheet of paper (you wonder what that is, but the print is a bit small and grey) but didn’t actually break off from talking to someone else to make you welcome. Where do I go now? It’s like visiting an unfamiliar multiplex … which door do I go through to find my friend? But no one notices your uncertainty.

You wander through the door which most other people are using (always a good sign), and are in the main auditorium. But you can’t see your friend … can’t see the doughnuts … the band is still soundchecking … and after a few minutes you begin to wonder if the rest of the audience, who are mostly standing around and chatting, can’t see you either. Have you worn your invisibility cloak? You give your friend two minutes to find you, otherwise you’ll be offski.

Practical hint – if you are bringing someone new, arrange to meet them at a rendezvous point on their route and come in with them, it’s like being able to use that VIP channel at airport security. The one person that they already know is their passport to a whole new group of friends.

But the challenge is … why didn’t we notice that new person who had just arrived for the first time. And, equally, do we notice the established member who looked a bit out of it.

The way Rick Warren puts the challenge is – how can I start treating other people at church like my own family?

How can we help people make newcomers feel at home? Literally! Perhaps a simple listening skills course would help, aimed at working through the "Hi, I’m Tom" scenario, helping people to offer friendship and to open doors.  How many of us have "the ability to build relationships"? What does it depend on?

Here’s Donald Miller from Blue like Jazz (Chapter 18):

Here is something very simple about relationships … : Nobody will listen to you unless they sense that you like them.

If a person senses that you do not like them, that you do not approve of their existence, then your religion and your political ideas will all seem wrong to them. If they sense that you like them, then they are open to what you have to say …

When I am talking to somebody there are always two conversations going on. The first is on the surface; it is about politics or music or whatever our mouths are saying. The other is beneath the surface, on the level of the heart, and my heart is either communicating that I like the person I am talking to or I don’t. God wants both conversations to be true. That is, we are supposed to speak truth in love … if you talk to somebody with your mouth, and your heart does not love them, you are like a person standing there smashing two cymbals together. You are only annoying everybody around you …

Now … when I go to meet somebody, I pray that God will help me feel His love for them. I ask God to make it so both conversations, the one from the mouth and the one from the heart, are true.

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?

We have a small team in our church which has been looking at welcome and hospitality. The team’s role is to inspire all of the body parts to think welcome and hospitality, not to leave it to a number of people on a rota. This series of posts will highlight the different stages we go through as we approach any church community, and raise issues for discussion.

Do we need to look at how we appear and how we integrate new members? If you doubt this, then ask a couple of unchurched people to come along and check out our meeting, and tell you honestly what they think.

One person who did this was Jim Henderson, who hired a thinking atheist (Matt Casper) to join him to visit a number of very varied American churches – from the megachurch down to a house church, and across a spectrum from traditional to contemporary.

Sometimes, Matt is genuinely impressed by what he sees, but sometimes he ends up saying to Jim that he cannot square what he sees with what he understands of Christ’s teaching … especially in the connection between the words he hears and what he sees working out in the life of the church.

Another survey, closer home, was blogged by Simon Varwell in Glasgow in 2006. The end-of-round-one post makes interesting reading.

Some of the churches visited were, once perhaps they had got over their chagrin at being labelled unwelcoming, able to look at themselves constructively through Simon’s posts and able to become more welcoming as a result. That’s what we hope these posts will do too.

If you are part of our community: Do you think we are welcoming? Or does it depend on already knowing someone who will help you to find your way in?

If not: What is your community like in welcoming new people?