How do visitors and members connect with and understand your church?
Who is reaching out to them? How often?  Are they being “invited” to anything?
How do they know what’s going on? And how do they stay in touch with you?

What’s the “interface”?

Seems like an obvious question with an obvious answer, but in the last several churches we’ve attended, the answer wasn’t/isn’t so obvious. In fact, those churches might be SURPRISED to hear how UN-INVITED a visitor feels.  (You can read about my experiences with those churches in earlier posts).

And some members would be surprised how easy it is for an active member to begin to slide away from the congregation -long before their absence is noticed by the staff or leaders.  These truths are self-evident to my wife and I because we have experienced them both.  The problem is that there is often no active or regular interface between visitors/members and the shepherds in the congregation. Indeed, many congregations don’t have anything approximating ’shepherds’.

A Recent Case In Point:

My wife works every other weekend and can’t make Sunday worship. One of the Sunday’s she didn’t work because she was sick. So TWO Sundays in a row she missed the only two verbal announcements that there was going to be a new member class and reception of new members next Sunday. She WAS in attendance the Sunday they took in 3 new members, and was quite dismayed that she didn’t know about the class and hadn’t been invited. Nobody from the church called her or sent her a note inviting her. Had they called her, she would have said “yes, I’ll join.” (And she’s no wallflower, however, and vows to contact the pastor about being in the next one.)

In a previous church which we visited for five months (and posted about in this thread), the invitation to join showed up in the mail 2 months after we stopped going there.

Church Newsletters were the traditional method of “staying in touch.” But in our current church, they don’t have one, and in the previous church we had attended, they never put us on the mailing list (and they had a big staff, so no excuse there). 

And the problem with church newsletters, other than people not reading them, is that they get stacked or thrown away. The biggest single improvement you could make in yours would be to send me a “highlights” postcard the week after the newsletter –a card that goes on the frig …and not an entire calendar page please!  …my frig doesn’t have that much room.

How do visitors and new members figure out WHO the LEADERS are?  Again, in the last two churches we spent months visiting, I couldn’t tell you who was in charge. I could guess, but it was just a guess. One Sunday early in December I asked several people when the Christmas Eve services were, and got 3 different answers. And those I asked were all people I had seen in some sort of leadership capacity.

The Sunday Bulletin/Program is often a great way to communicate to members and visitors… if they are in attendance. But often the bulletin is lacking in info. And have you ever noticed that the most timely announcements seem to get elaborated on as ”verbal” announcements instead of being written in the bulletin where I can take the info home with me?  …And once again, …all that written and verbal announcing  relies on ME the visitor. It’s not true “outreach.”  It’s more like “take it or leave it.”

Other helps:
A good church website would help, but only if it was updated. One former church used the PhoneTree calling machine to send announcements. I thought it was quite effective, …if you were a member. But visitors weren’t put on it.

Newsletters, websites phonetrees machines, announcements in worship, and church bulletins are all PASSIVE attempts in a church culture that SAYS it values “outreach.” 
But: Text is not “outreach.” And: Text is not an “invitation.” 

…Announcements aren’t outreach, either.

No, –it’s the HUMAN INTERFACE that really counts.
So who in your church is providing that?
Who is doing the follow up, and how often?

If you don’t know that answer, then you probably have a problem.

Earlier in this post I used the image of “shepherd” because it’s a good one and happens to be biblical too. The shepherd doesn’t announce to the sheep where they are to graze that day. The shepherd leads them, guides them, even hooks them with his crook and drags them if need be.

Who’s doing the shepherding in your church? Probably not the pastor, and even if he/she is doing it, they can’t be the only one. And if you leave it up to everyone, it’s been left up to no one.

I could go on with examples of how you track and contact and care for visitors and members, but that’s easy to figure out and there are many resources out there.  The hardest thing about doing it, is admitting that you’re NOT doing it, and then summoning up the WILL to not let it slide down the list of things to do.