CHURCH BUILDINGS AND THE MISSION OF THE CHURCH

This comes to us from Thom and Sam Rainer and is posted on Dr. Steve’s blog, THE OUTWARD-FOCUSED CHURCH.

 8 Things the Unchurched Think About Your Church

by Thom S Rainer and Sam S Rainer

FROM CHURCHLEADERS.COM

What do the unchurched say about church buildings? Thom and Sam Rainer researched the answer.

The e-mail in our inbox began with a simple question: “What do the unchurched say about church buildings?” Asking the question was a group of church builders, including Cogun, Aspen Group, and The Cornerstone Knowledge Network, who wanted to convey to pastors what features, if any, of a church building help or hinder unchurched people in coming to church.

A study of this nature had never been completed, but our team knew based on a previous study that 42% of those currently attending a Protestant church were unchurched prior to their decision to attend that church. With such a large portion of congregations consisting of people who are new to church, could the actual church building have anything to do with attracting or pushing them away?

Recognizing this tangible aspect of how the unchurched view the Church is crucial to reaching them for Christ. So our researchers began the task of interviewing more than 350 people of different age groups from 45 states. The interviewees were all formerly unchurched and had recently joined a local body of believers. These are the important points we discovered about church facilities.

1. The church facility plays an important role in attracting the unchurched.

Each church body’s unique situation calls for a different type of style, venue, and size, but in short, attractive, organized, and well-maintained church facilities help attract the unchurched.

2. The church building is not the primary motivating factor for the unchurched.

While the appearance of the church building is clearly important, it is not the primary reason the unchurched choose to attend. They go to church due to feeling a void in their lives or because someone invited them. Therefore, the main factors are still the work of the Holy Spirit in their hearts and the obedience of churchgoers to the Great Commission in inviting their unchurched friends and neighbors.

3. The worship area is the unchurched’s favorite part of the church.

The formerly unchurched group we interviewed declared the worship area to be the most important part of the church building. Our respondents ranked beauty, comfort, and worship setting as the three key components of a worship area. Therefore, an attractive, comfortable, and worshipful sanctuary is extremely important when drawing and keeping the unchurched.

4. The unchurched blame poor finances for unattractive buildings.

Churches that did not have adequate or attractive buildings were perceived by the unchurched as underfunded. But the credit for attractive facilities was given to the leadership of the church. Church leaders need to know that pouring more money into their buildings is not a solution in itself. However, if little financial care is allotted to the church facilities, the formerly unchurched see lack of money as a major hurdle to their attendance.

5. A “third place” area draws people to a church building.

A “third place” area is a social gathering point, such as a coffee shop, outside the usual community environments of work and home. As the importance of these gathering areas grows in our society, churches that provide places for the community to socialize throughout the week are much better positioned to reach the unchurched people in their neighborhoods.

6. Church gyms are not appealing to the unchurched.

Many pastors hear their members saying that building a gym will help attract the unchurched in their community. Our research, however, found the exact opposite to be true—one of the church areas considered least important to the unchurched was a gym. In general, gyms or fitness centers serve their current membership and have little effect on attracting the unchurched.

7. The church building is rarely a cause of conflict.

Our research dispelled the axiom that church facilities or building programs are major instigators of church conflict. We found little to no conflict directly attributed to the church building. Additionally, the formerly unchurched people we interviewed perceived little conflict surrounding the church facilities.

8. The church building aids evangelistic efforts.

A building is certainly not a necessity piece in obeying the evangelism imperative, but appealing church facilities can increase a newly churched person’s comfort level in inviting others to church. This invitation plays a huge role in the process of seeing people come to Christ. Our research demonstrates that the most evangelistically successful churches have facilities that people perceive as attractive.

Pastors and lay leaders can learn valuable lessons about their church building by viewing it through the eyes of the unchurched. Invite someone from the community who has never visited your church and ask them to write a step-by-step narrative of their experience in your church building and worship service. You may be surprised at what they say about your signage, seating, navigation, and other aesthetics. What’s more, they may give you some fresh ideas on how to better draw visitors to your church.

Thom S. Rainer is the president and CEO of LifeWay Christian Resources. He was founding dean of the Billy Graham School of Missions, Evangelism, and Church Growth at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. His many books include Surprising Insights from the Unchurched, The Unexpected Journey, and Breakout Churches.

Sam S. Rainer III serves as a pastor at Sarasota Baptist Church. Sam is the co-author of the recently released book, Essential Church?: Reclaiming a Generation of Dropouts. He also serves as president of Rainer Research, a firm dedicated to providing answers for better church health. He is a frequent conference speaker on church health issues. Sam enjoys hanging out with friends and family in the Florida sunshine.

Copyright © by Outreach magazine. All rights reserved. Used by permission.

SIGNIFICANT FACTS REGARDING FIRST-TIME VISITORS

From Rick Ezell and Sermon Central comes something I’d like all of us to think about and ask, “How are we doing?” – Steve

You may be the most skilled preacher and your church may have excellent small groups or the best children’s ministry in the city, but your first-time guests will never know unless they make a second or third visit.

Healthy and growing churches pay close attention to the people they count as members, as well as those people who are not yet a part of the flock. These churches know that new people are the lifeblood of a growing church. Like a spigot, they want to keep the valve open for the flow of new people, and most importantly, they want to ensure that nothing impairs or cuts off the flow of new people to the church.

With that in mind, pastors need to be aware of five significant facts about first-time guests looking for a church home.

1. Visitors make up their minds regarding a new church in the first ten minutes of their visit.

Often, before a first-time guest has sung an inspiring song or watched a compelling drama or viewed a well-produced video vignette or heard a well-crafted sermon, they have made up their mind whether or not to return. In fact, if you ask most church leaders, far more time and energy are spent on the plan and execution of the worship service, with only minimal time spent on preparing for the greeting and welcoming of the first-time guest, which is equally if not more important. Most pastors would rather not hear this: The church’s ability to connect with first-time guests is not dependent on you, but on those first lines of people who represent your church.

• Are parking attendants in place?
• Is there appropriate signage?
• Are your ushers and greeters performing the “right” job?
• Is the environment you take for granted user-friendly and accepting to guests?

2. Most church members aren’t friendly.

Churches claim to be friendly. In fact, many churches put that expression in their logo or tag line. But my experience in visiting churches as a first-time guest proves otherwise. The truth is that most church members are friendly to the people they already know, but not to guests.

• Observe to see if your members greet guests with the same intensity and concern before and after the worship service as they do during a formal time of greeting in the worship service. A lack of friendliness before and after the service sends a mixed, if not hypocritical, message to new people.
• The six most important minutes of a church service, in a visitor’s eyes, are the three minutes before the service and the three minutes after the service, when church members introduce themselves, seeking genuinely to get to know the visitors (not just obtain personal information like the market research data collectors at the mall), offer to answer any questions, introduce them to others who may have a connection (perhaps they live in the same neighborhood, are from the same hometown or state, or their children attend the same school), or any number of ways to demonstrate to the visitors that they as a church member care.
• A church would be wise to discover their most gregarious and welcoming members and deploy them as unofficial greeters before and after each service, in addition to designated parking-lot greeters, door greeters, ushers, and informational booth personnel.
• Don’t make promises the church can’t keep. My wife attended a church recently that calls itself “The Friendly _______ Baptist Church,” but no one spoke to her before the service and when she sought information from the guest information booth she was treated by the attendant as a bother. Mixed messages and unfulfilled promises do great harm in a church’s effectiveness in welcoming new people.

3. Church guests are highly consumer-oriented.

“If Target doesn’t have what I need, I just head to K-Mart.” “If the Delta airfare is too high, American might have a sale.” Capitalism has taught us that if we don’t find what we want, someone else down the street or at another web site will have it. If your church building is too hard for newcomers to navigate, if they have to park in the “back 40,” if your people are unaccepting and unfriendly, another church down the street may have what they’re looking for. Or worse yet, they may decide getting into a church is not worth the effort and give up their search altogether.

• Pastors and church leaders need to look at their churches through the eyes of a first-time guest. Rick Warren says that the longer a pastor has been a pastor, the less he thinks like a non-pastor. That same thought would apply to thinking like a guest.
• The use of objective, yet trained, anonymous guests to give an honest appraisal is very important. Many retail outlets utilize the service of one or more “mystery guests” to provide helpful analysis of welcoming and responding to the consumer. Churches would be well served to utilize a similar service.

4. The church is in the hospitality business.

Though our ultimate purpose is spiritual, one of our first steps in the Kingdom business is attention to hospitality. Imagine the service that would be given to you in a first-class hotel or a five-star restaurant. Should the church offer anything less to those who have made the great effort to be our guests?

• Hospitality is almost a forgotten virtue in our society. When was the last time someone invited you to their home for a meal? But it needs to be reawakened.
• Church members can extend hospitality to guests by offering to sit with them during the church service, giving them a tour of the church facilities, inviting them to lunch after service, or connecting with them later in the week.

5.  You only have one chance to make a good first impression.

More than a truism, first impressions are lasting ones. Little hope of correcting a bad first impression is possible. Your first-time guests have some simple desires and basic needs. They decide very quickly if you can meet those criteria. The decision to return for a second visit is often made before guests reach your front door.

• Are you creating the entire experience, beginning with your parking lot?
• Are you consciously working to remove barriers that make it difficult for guests to find their way around and to feel at home with your people?
• Do newcomers have all the information they need without having to ask any embarrassing questions?
• Are your greeters and ushers on the job, attending to details and anticipating needs before they are expressed?
• Does anything about your guests’ first experience make them say, “Wow!” and want to return?

You may be the most skilled preacher and your church may have excellent small groups or the best children’s ministry in the city. Your first-time guests will never know unless they make a second or third visit. Will they come back? It all depends on the impression you’re making. Make it the right one the first time.

Copyright 2006, Rick Ezell.

Rick Ezell

RickEzell.net

Rick Ezell is the pastor at First Baptist Church in Greer, South Carolina. Rick is a consultant, conference leader, communicator, and coach. He is the author of six books, including Strengthening the Pastor’s Soul.

CHURCH DROPOUTS – WHY PEOPLE FIND IT EASY TO LEAVE

This past Saturday Sam Ruggiero and I attended a workshop led by Chris Walker, the Evangelism Coach. Part of his presentation focused on a problem most churches have, especially if they don’t have a commitment to and a specific strategy to overcome it.  As more and more new people come into the church through our outreach programs, I find myself asking, “How can we close the back door before they slide on through?”  Read this article from his archives. I’d appreciate your feedback – Dr Steve

I’ve been a church drop out twice, once while I was an associate pastor.  Isn’t that funny?

As I reflected on those experiences through the lens of church growth strategies and evangelism, I want to set aside the data that is out there and just share my own experience.

Why do we make all the efforts to share the gospel with people, get them connected to a local church, and then let them drop out?

Why was it easy to drop out?

1.  No place to serve.

This sounds funny having been the associate pastor.  I could tell stories, but this venue isn’t the place to air them.   Let it simply be said that after a few years, I had nothing to do.  All my duties had been given to someone else.  There is no point in figuring out all the why’s and hows of that development, but the end result: no purpose, no job, no joy.

In the second place, we stayed for two years yet never found a way to serve in a way that fit the church’s schedule with our life.  We tried one ministry, but it was do disorganized that it hurt to serve.

2.  Not enough connections or deep friendships.

It was very easy to leave because there was hardly any social network to withdraw from.

In other words, it didn’t hurt to leave.

We didn’t really have anyone to say goodbye to.

Sure we had a few friends, but we saw them in other ways, spent time at their house, our children played together.  We still had meals together and talked on the phone.

But the pain of saying good bye to close friends didn’t exist.

After we left, it didn’t feel to us that anyone noticed our absence either.  With one or two exceptions, no one called to see why we were missing.

3.  Not enough common experiences

We eventually saw that we were missing out on various community building events.   We missed them for various reasons, most of which are good and understandable.

But the end result — we lacked the communal experience that bonds a group of people together.

We didn’t get to build a house together with Habitat.

We didn’t get to serve together in a neighborhood outreach.

We didn’t get to connect or contribute in small groups.

We didn’t get to grow with people through common experience. . . .

We didn’t get the announcements of events that were happening. . .

I even wasn’t invited to go on a pastors retreat with the rest of the staff I was on.

The end result: Marginalization.

We didn’t drop out the back door over theology.

We didn’t drop out the back door because of how the pastor treated us.

We didn’t drop out the back door some offense between someone and ourselves.

We dropped out the back door because we were in the margins

We couldn’t stay in.

We couldn’t get in.

The therapist will wonder what root behaviors caused this to happen.

They psychoanalyst will try to find fault in my family of origin.

Others will try to find some kind of problem within our family that caused this to happen twice.  Still others will blame the church.

We don’t.  It’s life, it happened, we go on.

I am not sharing this to have people counsel me, but to look at my story from a church growth / evangelism perspective.

If it was easy for me to drop out the back door, what can you do to help close that door.

Closing the back door.

1.  Build systems that allow friendships to happen.

As you think of your visitor assimilation process, what can you do to help new church visitors build relationships and keep them in your congregation?

Small groups, cells, service events are all excellent ways to provide a context for friendships to happen.

I came across a statistic that said that at least in North America, if a visitor doesn’t form a primary relationship with someone other than the pastor in the first six months, they will leave.

Close the back door by helping people develop new and meaningful relationships around faith.

2.  Help people serve and contribute

There are many practical ways people can serve in a church.  Ask the already overworked volunteers what they’d like to delegate, and you’ll find some new spots for new people.  Or, use spiritual gift inventories to help new people discover where they can serve out of their gifting and passion.

Close the back door by empowering others to serve out of their gifting and passion.

3.  Plan common experiences

Some of my closest friends walked with me for 5 years as we did youth ministry together.  There were lots of common experiences around camp fires, retreats, events, prayer times and play times. Some spent time at a pancake house after Sunday services, others spent time at my house on Tuesdays.

We simply had opportunities for life together.

Take the principle and apply it to a church level — what are some common experiences that you can plan that will help your church bond with each other?  For many, it’s various community service outreach events.  For others, it might be an adopted mission project — this is what “we” do.

This weekend for example, the men of our church are going fishing (we are a small house church, so this is easy in our context).

Close the back door by building community through shared experience.

4.  Foster the DNA of care and seeking

In otherwords, encourage people to always be looking for who is missing.  This is obviously very easy when the group is small.  It gets challenging when churches get bigger.

How you do this is contextually dependent.

But developing the DNA to notice the missing and care for the hurting will help keep your people from walking out the back door.

Close the back door by caring for those who hurt.

Close the back door by noticing who is dropping out.

THIS MY KIND OF CHURCH AD

My friend Dan Masshardt sent me this video via his blog. This is my kind of church ad. It’s the kind of testimony I pray would be that of the Church of God of Landisville.

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THOUGHTS OF A FIRST-TIME VISITOR

This comes to us from a web site called Evangelism Coach.