Table of Contents

How Do You Know If You Are Ready for Redevelopment?

by Jim Caprell

Reversing Unwelcoming Welcome Habits

by Peter W. Marty

Renewing a Mainline Congregation Requires More Than Praise Music and Small Groups

by R. Robert Cueni

How to Address the Stress Points in Turnaround Churches

by William M. Easum

Revitalizing the Rural (or Anywhere!) Church

by James A. Shelly

So Tell Me...Interviews with Faithful, Effective, and Innovative Leaders:  Featuring Ron Martoia

by Norman Jameson

Turnaround Congregations Moving from Decline to Health, Growth, Renewed Mission

by Marta Poling-Goldenne

Building the Human Resources Team

by Thomas G. Bandy

The Church That's Continually Opening New Doors

by Dale E. Galloway

Coaching Corner

by Peter W. Marty

           Careful notice of the verbs in Scripture can sometimes reveal the most powerful details. Take for example the story in and around Genesis 18:2. Three divine guests show up at Abraham and Sarah’s tent by the oaks of Mamre--arguably Scripture’s greatest passage on hospitality. In this story Abraham’s agility as a senior citizen comes to light! His behavior in the presence of special guests shows anything but the passive approach. In fact, the writer tells us that when Abraham sees the three individuals approaching his quarters, he runs from the tent entrance to meet them. Abraham runs toward his guests to welcome them. He leaves the cool shade of his tent to be where they stand in the hot sun.

            Even the most hospitable congregations struggle to master this act of moving outward from ourselves toward other people. Most of our church behavior, even in the friendliest instances, rests in the subliminal expectation that other people will enter our space and comfortably move toward us. Our evangelically driven, outward-seeking mentality often twists around to become inward-directed reality.

            An assigned greeter arrives on Sunday, asks for the whereabouts of her name tag, and then queries the pastor: “Remind me again--where do I stand?” A coffee host gets the doughnut table set up and then situates himself by the cup tray, ready with a smile to pour a cup of coffee for anyone who should step up. A Sunday school teacher begins her lesson for the day when a new student shows up in the doorway with a parent in tow. “Come on in and have a seat over there. What’s your name? Today we’re learning about Abraham.”

            What do all of these examples have in common? They all ask other people to come to the territory of the host. In none of them does the host move toward the guest with the outward initiative Abraham showed.

            Successful hospitality always has an outward movement to it. If you want to host the kind of dinner party in your home that people will remember fondly, you don’t begin the evening by expecting your guests to enter alone and find you somewhere in the kitchen. No, you go enthusiastically to your guests at the door. You offer to take their coats. In time, you bring beverages or hors d’oeuvres to them. All of your movements shift away from yourself and toward your guests--not the reverse. Physicists would draw this direction of motion with arrows pointing centrifugally out from a center, not centripetally in toward a center.

            Our congregation’s discovery of this shift in hospitality thinking came by accident on a summer Sunday, the first of several planned “Lemonade Days.” We set up low tables and small chairs outside all of the exterior doors for young children to serve lemonade to incoming and outgoing worshipers. In short order, the kids abandoned their tables and chairs in order to walk, and in most cases to run, across the parking lots to greet arriving worshipers with sloshing cups. Never mind whether anyone felt in the mood for lemonade at 8:00 in the morning! The sight was beautiful--children fanning out across the property, reaching out and looking up to hand sugary green water to tall strangers barely out of their cars. These littlest ones of the kingdom left the shaded canopy of the church entryway to be where the guests arrived in the hot sun. St. Paul Church’s hospitality efforts changed from that day forward.

            Guided by Mary, a gifted staff member in evangelism, the Open Door Spirit (as we called it) was born. Mary hosted a late-summer Open Door rally that introduced seventy-five people to the new spirit. This kick-off occasion helped us embrace a new model of congregational hospitality. In skit fashion, players acted out the Abraham-by-the-oaks-of-Mamre story, using modern imagery and contemporary language. Once the gathered people had the chance to guess which biblical story they had witnessed, we read Genesis 18 in reader’s theater fashion. Of course, we served food at the rally. Before the evening’s end, Open Door Teams had formed to reverse old habits of welcoming people to church.

            Consider these ten key ingredients when shaping an Open Door Spirit in your own congregation:

1. Build a contagious spirit by recruiting a core of enthusiastic people to head up new thinking. From the seed of their efforts, participation from the entire congregation can grow naturally.

2. Train new recruits to sit in unfamiliar places in worship and participate in church events that they do not usually attend. New surroundings create new understanding.

3. Reconstitute people’s concept of Sunday morning. It can be a great big party hosted in your church home to welcome one another warmly.

4. Change the language with which you refer to people. Shift from visitor to guest and from greeter to host.

5. End the distinction between members and visitors that dominates manuals on church hospitality. Why the segregation? Is either group more important than the other? As the thirty-foot-tall banner that once hung from our tower proclaimed: “Let all who enter here be received as Christ.”

6. Deinstitutionalize the signals you send, jettisoning things like laminated or computer-printed name tags for more personalized and impromptu hand-scrawled ones.

7. Make sure food is a part of your hospitality energies. Jesus’ most powerful encounters came at meals, parties, and other food-sharing times. Abraham served bread, milk, and curds to his three guests.

8. Think less in terms of “stationary greeting places” and more in terms of “zone” welcoming. A flexibility and grace of movement emerges when team members don’t park themselves in fixed places. (As you reshape volunteer behavior, watch for one common sight: ushers who lapse into “statue” mode, mechanically dispensing bulletins from specifically assigned positions.)

9. Operate in pairs, always in range of someone else on your team. Togetherness contributes to individual confidence--a crucial component in successful hospitality. Jesus sent his disciples out by twos for a reason. Abraham and Sarah (however patriarchal their story may appear from one angle) worked together to provide food for their guests under the oak trees.

10. Avoid smothering newcomers with inauthentic attention. They need and deserve breathing space. Notice in Genesis 18 how Abraham allows his divine guests to rest themselves under the tree. The underlying manner of one’s behavior can put others at ease.

            Every congregation has its own personality and traditions, not to mention some distinct constraints that arise from the layout of its building. But a little creative thinking and thoughtful adaptation of some age-old hospitality habits can go a long way toward guests’ either remembering your party with fondness . . . or wondering why they ever came.

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