Beyond the First Visit: The Complete Guide to Connecting Guests to Your Church

"Dr. Gary L. McIntosh is a coach who knows the fundamentals of church life and outreach. Every sport requires excellence with athletic fundamentals. All great ball players can throw and catch. When it comes to congregational outreach the fundamentals are inviting, welcoming, and following up with guests. Beyond the First Visit is an essential training tool on how to implement these fundamentals."

Dr. John W. Ellas, Center for Church Growth

Most churches evaluate themselves from the insider’s perspective. Gary McIntosh has learned, as a church consultant with years of experience, to see the churches he visits from the first time guest’s point of view. . . . We only have one chance to make a first impression!

Eddie Gibbs, Fuller Theological Seminary

"Gary McIntosh’s new book fills a long-standing void. No one (to my knowledge) since Lyle Schaller’s Assimilating New Members, published in 1978, has addressed the challenge of effectively including new people in the church’s life with this much background, savvy, and precision. This book will enable tens of thousands of churches to develop a game plan for reaching, welcoming, including, and developing new people in the local church’s life."

George G. Hunter III, distinguished professor of Evangelism and

Church Growth, Asbury Theological Seminary

This book is great! It’s filled with practical ideas to tackle every local church’s greatest challenge: how to connect and disciple new people. We have already begun to implement many of Gary’s excellent ideas.

Dr. Gary D. Kinnaman, author and senior pastor,

Word of Grace, Mesa, AZ

Other books by Gary L. McIntosh

Church That Works

Biblical Church Growth

The Exodus Principle

Look Back, Leap Forward

Make Room for the Boom . . . or Bust

One Church, Four Generations

One Size Doesn’t Fit All

Staff Your Church for Growth

Evaluating the Church Growth Movement

With Glen Martin

Creating Community

Finding Them, Keeping Them

The Issachar Factor

With Robert Edmondson

It Only Hurts on Monday

With Sam Rima

Overcoming the Dark Side of Leadership

With R. Daniel Reeves

Thriving Churches in the Twenty-first Century

BEYOND THE

FIRST

VISIT

THE COMPLETE GUIDE

TO CONNECTING

GUESTS TO YOUR CHURCH

GARY L . MCINTOSH

© 2006 by Gary L. McIntosh

Published by Baker Books

a division of Baker Publishing Group

P.O. Box 6287, Grand Rapids, MI 49516-6287

www.bakerbooks.com

Printed in the United States of America

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—for example, electronic, photocopy, recording—without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

McIntosh, Gary, 1947–

Beyond the first visit : the complete guide to connecting guests to your

church / Gary L. McIntosh.

              p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references (p.     ).

ISBN 10: 0-8010-9184-5 (pbk.)

ISBN 978-0-8010-9184-1 (pbk.)

1. Church attendance. 2. Church growth. 3. Church marketing. 4. Church work. 5. Hospitality—Religious aspects—Christianity. I. Title.

BV652.S.M35 2006

254'.5—dc22

2006010300

Scripture is taken from the New American Standard Bible—Updated Edition, © 1999 by The Zondervan Corporation; © the Lockman Foundation 1960, 1962, 1963, 1968, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1975, 1977, 1995.

Portions of this book are reprinted from The Exodus Principle (Broadman and Holman, 1995) by Gary L. McIntosh. Used by permission.

CONTENTS

1. Empty the Cat Litter Box

2. Be a Great Host

3. See What Visitors See

4. Notch Up Your Ministry

5. Create a Lasting Impression

6. Spread the Word

7. Start New Ministries

8. Guesterize Your Church

9. Focus on Your Prospects

10. Build Pathways of Belonging

11. Invest in People

12. Customize Your Welcome

13. Don’t Assimilate Me

14. Design a Strategy

Notes

Recommended Resources

1

EMPTY THE CAT LITTER BOX

I have felt lonely, forgotten or even left out,

set apart from the rest of the world.

I never wanted out. If anything I wanted in.

Arthur Jackson

Whenever company is coming over to our house, my family goes through a regular ritual called getting ready for company. For us it involves such things as cleaning the bathrooms, emptying the trash cans, vacuuming the floors, dusting the counters, and, most important, changing the cat litter boxes. All our effort is expended in preparation for our guests. We want our house to look the best, and we spare no amount of effort to see that it is ready. No doubt you can identify with this experience.

Growing churches also spend a significant amount of time getting ready for their company—visitors. For them it involves such things as preparing an attractive worship service, organizing teams of greeters, cleaning the church facility, offering refreshing snacks, and, most important, creating a welcoming environment. These churches believe they have only one chance to make a first impression, and they want the visitor to experience a friendly welcome.

We’re a Friendly Church

If you were to survey churches and ask them to list their strengths, almost every one would include, We’re a friendly church. I know this for a fact as I have asked this question of more than one thousand churches during the last twenty-five years. It’s interesting that in every one of the churches I coached, someone either wrote on a survey or stated verbally that they believed their church to be a friendly place. It did not matter if the individuals were attending churches in danger of closing down, in the midst of twenty-year-long plateaus, or bursting forth in growth. They all felt their church was a friendly one. Apparently, regardless of the state of their health or their size, most churches consider themselves to be friendly.

However, if you were to have surveyed the visitors who attended those same churches, you might have been given an opposite perception. For example, in one church I consulted with a few years ago, I discovered that during a two-year period only 3 visitors out of 197 had chosen to remain in the church. Apparently, more than 97 percent of that church’s visitors did not feel very welcomed.

Often church visitors report that churches are cold, unwelcoming, and not very friendly. How is it that two people can experience the same event and feel so differently about it? How can members believe their church is friendly, while newcomers experience an unfriendly atmosphere? The answer is perception. Here is how it works. People who attend a church regularly look at the issue of friendliness from the inside out. From their perspective, they are experiencing a friendly atmosphere. They know other people and other people know them—by name. When they have a personal need, their friends take notice and respond with appropriate action. Their perception is that the church is a friendly place.

In contrast, visitors view the issue of friendliness from the outside in. They are experiencing a totally new atmosphere. They may not know other people and other people may not know them. If they have needs, they are rarely noticed, let alone responded to with appropriate action. So visitors may perceive the church as an unfriendly place.

If guests

to our church

don’t think

we’re friendly,

we aren’t.

Such different perceptions remind us that beauty is in the eye of the beholder or, in this case, friendliness is in the eye of the beholder. Another way to say it is perception is reality. We may think our church is friendly, but it is only friendly to the degree that those visiting our church perceive it to be so.

Now, we know that beauty is not always only in the eye of the beholder, nor is perception always reality. For example, some people perceive there is no God, while in reality there is one. As Psalm 14:1 reminds us: The fool has said in his heart, ‘There is no God.’ In a similar way it is possible for a church to be a friendly place even though some visitors perceive otherwise. But this does not change the fact that in the eye of the beholder, in this case the visitor, perception will be their reality. The bottom line is if visitors do not perceive us as friendly, we are not.

A clear example of this is painfully close to my heart. My mother and grandmother were raised, committed themselves to the Lord, and attended church in Missouri and Oklahoma in the early to mid-1900s. They were loyal to church, like most people of their generations, attending every time the doors of the church were open. After a fire destroyed their apartment in Tulsa, Oklahoma, they moved to Colorado Springs, Colorado, to live closer to my uncle. They found jobs, rented a small house, and went looking for a church.

As I remember the story, their experience was far from positive. They met unfriendly people in every church they attended. Their perception was that churches in Colorado Springs rejected them due to their Okie mannerisms. In reality, I know that not every church they attended was so unfriendly. However, in the eyes of my mother and grandmother the churches they visited were unfriendly, and that was reality as far as they were concerned. Their perception was strong enough that my mother, who was twenty-four at the time, and my grandmother, who was fifty-one, never attended any church on a regular basis for the rest of their lives.

The point is we must get ready for company! Company’s coming to our church every Sunday, and what visitors perceive in our welcome will influence their feelings and response to church and the Lord for years to come. Their viewpoints and perceptions must be considered valuable. What do visitors think about our church? How friendly do they perceive us to be? What steps can we take to welcome them better than we presently do? We must learn to attract, welcome, and follow up on guests so that they stay!

Our Welcoming God

Wanting to welcome newcomers to our church is more than a misguided attempt at consumer marketing. It is simply following the example set by God, who instructed Israel, When a stranger resides with you in your land, you shall not do him wrong. The stranger who resides with you shall be to you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt; I am the LORD your God (Lev. 19:33–34).

In the Old Testament, strangers were people of foreign blood, who wanted to live among the Israelites. Being outsiders and aliens, strangers did not normally enjoy the rights possessed by the residents of the country they visited. God instructed Israel, however, to welcome strangers, do them no wrong, and love them as members of the family. In practical terms strangers were allowed to listen to the reading of the law (Deut. 31:12); celebrate festivals, such as the Feast of the Atonement (Lev. 16:29) and the Feast of Booths (Deut. 16:14); and participate in religious observances (Num. 19:10). Outsiders enjoyed most of the same rights as native Israelites, such as freedom from oppression (Exod. 22:21), access to physical care (Lev. 19:10), and legal protection (Deut. 1:16; 24:17; 27:19). They also worked in building the temple (1 Chron. 22:2) and served in the army (2 Sam. 1:13).

The reason God required Israel to welcome strangers was the nation’s experience in Egypt. For you also were strangers in the land of Egypt, God explained. If anyone understood what it was like to be an oppressed outsider, it was Israel. You shall not oppress a stranger, God commanded, since you yourselves know the feelings of a stranger, for you also were strangers in the land of Egypt (Exod. 23:9; see Gen. 15:13). Thus Israel was to treat strangers with the love, protection, and respect they had wished for while living as outsiders in Egypt for four hundred years.

Jesus modeled the welcoming nature of God by accepting sinners. Luke describes one incident when Jesus tried to get away from the people to rest: "the crowds were aware of this and followed Him; and welcoming them, He began speaking to them about the kingdom of God and curing those who had need of healing" (Luke 9:11). Later, as tax collectors came to listen to Jesus teaching, the Pharisees and scribes criticized him for welcoming sinners (Luke 15:1–2).

Several different Greek words are used for welcome in the New Testament, but used together they suggest the meaning of gladly welcoming someone to one’s home as a guest. At the conclusion of Acts, Luke illustrates this aspect of welcoming visitors when he comments regarding Paul’s practice: "He stayed two full years in his own rented quarters and was welcoming all who came to him" (Acts 28:30). Paul’s practice of hospitality is instructive, for hospitality means literally love of strangers. In the New Testament, hospitality refers primarily to gracious acceptance of and service to fellow believers (see Rom. 12:13; 1 Pet. 4:9). Yet we must not lose sight of the inherent implications for unbelievers also.

When we extend

our hand of

welcome to

visitors, we

are extending

God’s hand

of grace.

Getting ready for company is much more than a sociological process for welcoming newcomers. It is a theological demonstration of God’s grace. As God’s people, we are to be welcomers just as God is a welcomer. When we welcome newcomers to church, we are demonstrating the gracious love and care of God himself. This may be good and well when welcoming those who are already believers, but what if they are unbelievers? Receiving strangers into our church does not mean that we approve of their sin but that we offer acceptance of each person without reserve. As the nation of Israel remembered their own captivity in Egypt, we must remember what it was like when we were captives of sin. Someone