Unwelcome - 50 Ways churches Drive Away First-Time Visitors, Johnathan Malm (Summer 2020)
This will be a short blog because this is a short book (168 pages with a small word-count/page format). This book was published by the Center for Church Communication (Los Angeles, CA) in 2014, and was written by Jonathan Malm, a Church communication and building specialist. The book is exactly what you would think. Malm shares his experience from ministry and from visiting hundreds of Churches while listing 50 first-time-visitor turn-offs in the categories of first impressions, worship programming, communication, & “big picture.” For the body of this blog, I’ll simply list and discuss some of the action steps I took away from this book for the Church where i worship and serve - Madison Church of Christ in Brooklyn, IA.
Make big, beautiful signs to put on any of our Church’s exterior doors that will be locked at certain times on Sunday mornings
Malm. actually. strongly recommends against locking any doors at all because of the severe experience of frustration and embarrassment a visitor may experience when attempting to open a locked one. However, he concedes that locking doors is sometimes necessary for security, and that is the case at Madison Church of Christ as we are committed to controlling and monitoring the entrance and exits to our sanctuary and kids ministry areas for the purposes of security. So, we need to post some big, beautiful signs explaining why and when certain doors to our building will be locked. I’ll be ordering these vinyl-cling signs soon.
3D Signs for restrooms, nursery, and basement
Too obvious, we don’t want our visitors to be unsure about where they should go.
Clear clutter
Our church is always clean. However, it is human nature to slowly grow accustomed to piles of stuff & clutter in public areas of the building over time and grow blind to them. Personally I have visited a couple of Churches in the last decade which suffer severely* from a learned blindness to their own messiness. Let’s not give the impression that we’re about to host a garage sale. Let’s start asking questions like: “what is the purpose of this thing we have in this place?” “Has it served its purpose anytime in the last year?” “How is this pile a part of our Great Commission work?” and then make our responses to those questions consequential and kinetic. In doing so we can focus the attention of our Church visitors away from our “stuff” and towards our living body and mission. Areas for consideration at Madison include the Library, missions corner, Sunday school classrooms, and balcony.
Delete unused social media accounts
I have been trying to grow our social media presence for a few years now for the purpose of outreach and community. I could really use some help in this endeavor. I’ve asked for it before, but I could really use some volunteers at Madison Church who would share the social-media posting privileges for our Church account and publish devotional and promotional content while establishing connections with followers and page visitors. In my efforts, I’ve made an Instagram profile that never gets posted on, a twitter account that has been abandoned, and a number of Facebook groups (like the Madison Reading Room) that are collecting cobwebs. they all need to be closed. If someone in our community finds us online (which happens pretty often) we need to ensure that they find recently updated and meaningful content.
somewhat related to this endeavor is a push we need to make to accumulate Google (& other platforms) review feedback. This initiative is more of a zero-time visitor focus instead of a first-time visitor focus, but recent and positive reviews on these platforms may play a huge role in getting someone to try Madison Church for the first time.
Never let volunteers go unused
This is an area where I have personally failed. I just need to do a better job of consistently connecting those who are willing to serve with opportunities to serve our Church body.
On-screen explanations of cultic rituals
maybe you’re familiar with the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper or believers baptism, but we can’t assume that the first time visitor is. A solution would be to provide simple on-screen text or video explanations of what is happening when we do these things in Church so that we can avoid panicking our visitors.
Have a “why” for our worship services and evaluate service elements and content against your goals
This is a long-term project that will need to be done as a whole-staff at Madison under the guidance of our Elders. The danger here is that you develop worship service habits or traditions which are not part of what you want to accomplish during that time as a Church. These bad (or meaningless) habits can begin for any number of reasons or occasions, but currently we don’t have a structure or direction outlined by which we can evaluate whether or not our worship services are what we want them to be which leaves us susceptible to accidental inanity. It is a first-time-visitor issue because the visitor has not been lulled into any sort of pattern or habit which regular Madisonites have developed and will be observing the pieces & direction of our worship service with a clarity that we’re not used to or even capable of. So lets set out goals - based on God’s word - for what our services should* be and should* accomplish, and then lets be disciplined about periodically evaluating what we are doing within the service for adherence to those pursuits.
Recommendation:
I found this to be a helpful book for thinking about how our Church can be a better, less-repelling place for visitors; I think you would too.
I’m sorry that i lied about the length of this blog. I got carried away. It may be a while before i post here again. I’ve started in on NT Wright and Michael Bird’s The New Testament In Its World which is 988 pages long (I’m on page 230 as of 8/7/2020) and i might take a break from it when my good buddy Dan is ready to read Christianity at the Crossroads with me.