Key Points for Welcoming Visitors to Church

As an active participant in church ministry involving the technology and student ministry, I have been given the opportunity to look at what might inspire young adults to move forward in their faith journey. I found that the following points are critical to attracting or retaining young adults to church.

- The traditional physical church setting (the traditional sanctuary) is not ideal for attracting those who have not attended a church for a significant period or those who do not like the traditional setting. The more contemporary the facility, the better it is for welcoming those who are new to church. Churches are now located in warehouses, large department store buildings, and other nonconventional facilities with great success.
- Interaction and welcoming people to church is critical for visitors, the greeting part is easy enough for churches to do, the harder part is to make them feel welcomed and to engage the visitors in a low key manner to help them get situated with the facility and worship service.
- Having a coffee bar (coffee, tea, hot chocolate, water, etc.) is important to welcoming visitors and existing worshippers alike as it provides the opportunity to create relationships, which is critical in one’s faith journey.
- Some kind of opportunity after the worship service to engage visitors and existing worshippers also provides another opportunity for relationship building. During a visit to Hawaii, I visited New Hope-Kailua Church in Oahu; they did a simple lunch after the service, which provided a great opportunity to meet new and existing worshippers.
- Using small groups to do a bible study of some sort is a key method of encouraging one’s progression of faith study. Small groups should only go for a specific period; otherwise, they become a click, which is not what you want.
- The use of multimedia is important in conveying key points during the message and during the music. People really like the words of the music being projected on large screens, it makes following along a lot easier.

I hope this provides some useful information for church leaders.

The Global Leadership Summit

I was blessed with the opportunity to again attend the Willow Creek Association’s Global Leadership Summit this year. Some of the key points I thought valuable and worth sharing are listed below.

Bill Hybels, Opening Session

• Not challenging people will result in a high turn over

• If you do not deal with the people who challenge your organization, you discourage all the other employees. You have to address the challenging people, they also are some of the unhappiest people

1. Are you naming the problems that exist in your organization? Some signs to look for include:
2. External reviews can be helpful to identify problems
3. Volunteerism was identified as being a decelerating
4. Stewardship also was in the same place along with evangelism

Five words that most describe the products or services of your church or business? Per Bill they are:

• Love, John 3:16
• Evil
• Rescue, God can rescue you with forgiveness
• Choice
• Restoration

Len Schlesinger, Action Trumps Everything

• Entrepreneurship can be learned
• If you can’t predict the future, then create it

Corey Booker (Mayor of Newark, NJ)

• Love, the central theme of the Christian faith
• Attitude speaks to your character
• Focus on the good and the potential
• How you live is defined by your values and actions

What a great speaker, he is realistic and honest.

Other speakers during Day 1 was the Rev. Dr. Brenda Salter McNeil, Seth Godin, and Steven Furtick. They all had a great story to tell that very much was inspiring and brutally honest, especially Steven Furtick’s presentation.

From Mama Maggie Gobran, Tough Callings

• Forgiveness is between you and God
• When one has nothing, God becomes everything
• Silent our body to listen to words, silent your tongue to listen to your thoughts, silence your hear to listen

Michelle Rhee, Students First

What a great and tough story about her experience as Chancellor of Washington DC schools. Her efforts to cut waste and poor productivity were very note worthy and something that I believe that needed done. It’s also says a lot about the DC Mayor Adrian Fenty in how he supported her even to the point of losing his reelection bid. In my opinion, school districts need more people like Rhee!

Dr. Henry Cloud, The Evil, The Foolish, The Wise

• Correct a wise person and he will get wiser still
• Listen to the truth
• Give me a gift! Aka give me feedback
• Being resourced is being given feedback
• Make sure people are gifted in what you want them to do, give them good feedback and coaching while being challenged appropriately
  
• Fools will try to adjust the truth or they shoot the messenger
• They (the fools) deny the message or situation, and they get angry and have a meeting after the meeting to spread their angry

Patrick Lencioni; check out his books 5 Dysfunctions and Getting Naked.

If you ever get a chance to attend the Summit, I would urge you to do so, it is very uplifting, offers great suggestions, and is grounded in Love, even for the hard choices.

2011 Global Leadership Summit

I attended the Willow Creek Association's 2011 Global Leadership Summit on 11-12 August at one of their satellite locations in Columbia, MD. What a great event, I'll be posting additional details later this week. For information on next years Summit, see the Willow Creek Association's web site at:
http://www.willowcreek.com/events/leadership/

Church IT Management Survey Results - Top 8 Findings

Now that my dissertation has been approved, I want to publish some key findings of the survey. Analysis of the top eight questions based on the lowest mean score of the answers suggests the following situation at churches.

1. Information technology leadership does not regularly participate in spiritual ministry strategic planning (Question 11).
2. No or little information technology performance metrics are collected; this suggests that information technology resource management and planning maybe missing important performance data that could help support funding or staffing requests (Question 8).
3. Information technology business processes are not used consistently; therefore, procedures and processes may not be consistent (Question 4).
4. Information technology funding is not sufficient to meet the needs of the church’s spiritual mission, therefore, the mission maybe limited and possibly does not meet its goals (Question 14).
5. Not all of the church’s technology resources are included in an IT management plan, therefore, the church may not have a holistic view of their technology resources and possibly lack support capacity for some technology resources (Question 17).
6. Documentation of information technology resources is not performed; this suggests that there is room for improvement in terms of maintenance of information technology resources in terms of service restoration (Question 7).
7. IT strategic planning is not taking place on a regular basis, therefore, the church may possibly be missing opportunities to align IT to the spiritual mission (Question 10).
8. The ministry side of the church is not working closely with the IT staff, therefore, they maybe missing opportunities to maximize the use of technology resources (Question 12).