How important is your customer?
How important is the visitor to your church?
If you are in business, how important is your customer?
Look at what Mahatma Gandhi says:
"A customer is the most important visitor on our premises.
He is not dependent on us, we are dependent on him.
He is not an interruption in our work, he is the purpose of it.
He is not an outsider to our business, He is part of it.
We are not doing him a favour by serving him, he is doing us a favour by giving us an opportunity to do so".
Healthy churches have at least 5-8 visitors for every 100 people in attendance at a service.
So some questions are:
Is there room for one more in your church? 75 – 80% full is the general rule. The service attendance will go up and down but generally stay the same if attendance is 75 – 80% full. A beg you please don’t limit what God wants to do because of building size. Maybe think about multiple services. Or planting another church across town.
You can pray and believe God for expansion, but growth in attendance WILL not happen long term. The question is, how many pickled onions can fit into one ten pickled onions jar? Ten. You can have mountain moving faith, fast and pray all you like, but if you don’t change the size of the container, forget getting more pickled onions in the jar!
How welcoming is your church? Visitors decide within the first 7-10 minutes if they will return. Welcoming begins in the car-park. Are those who welcome or those who host given regular training? Are they clearly identified?
One of the ways to test how welcoming your church is, is to ask a few friends who don’t come to your church, especially unchurched people and ask them to rate the church on the welcoming and the friendliness of the greeting etc. Did people talk to them and did they feel people were interested in them? Was it easy to find where the bathrooms were etc. If they had children, was it easy to locate where the children’s areas were?
- If not many visitors are regularly attending your church, the question needs to asked; Is there a culture of invitation? Perhaps leave room in the service to welcome one another, esp. visitors.
- How do you treat visitors and how much value do you place on your visitors? Do they feel special?
- How could you increase your visitor flow?
- How could your church make your visitors FEEL really welcome?
- If visitors wanted to take the next step into your church or business would they know what to do? Would they know where to go in the building or who to talk to?
We can’t do anything about yesterday, but we can do something about tomorrow. What are some above areas that you could begin to work on this week? That’s if you really care and value visitors??
