The Worship Minefield

There are all sorts of minefields you think you need to overcome when you first start going to Church. Like where to sit. Everyone has their usual spot, and woe betide the unknowing newcomer who pinches it, right? And, what if I don’t wear the right clothes and people think I look scruffy? My fiancé was mortified on one occasion when he forgot himself while going up to receive Communion. He was first out of the pew and rather than stepping back and waiting for the rest of us to file out and walk up ahead of him he just stalked off up the aisle, eager for his bread and wine. When I pointed this out to him later he spent all of the after-service tea and coffee time apologising to everyone else in our pew!

I managed to best this little faux-pas however, when, on a visit to Salisbury Cathedral for a Sunday service I, not being aware of the protocol, took myself off for Communion before the Steward instructed me to and managed to cause a bit of a hole in the line-up. So, if you’re going to make a mistake, go big and do it at a Cathedral.

The thing I’ve started to grasp though, and admittedly it’s probably taken me longer than it should have, is that people don’t care. 

read the rest here. Essential reading for any church (don't think to yourself that because you don't have Anglican formalities, you don't have traditions and in-house language, its just different to ours). This person, thankfully had her fiance to navigate her through the oddities. 

How many others just find it weird and don't bother coming back, because there are so many house rules they feel like an outsider, rather than a welcomed son or daughter?

Are people 'welcome' or welcome?

'Everyone welcome!' proclaims the poster outside the church. Is this a statement of fact, or a piece of marketing? It all depends on what happens when they turn up:

We all have people drifting into our churches from time to time. If they receive the right sort of welcome and feel they found a place where they can belong, a valuable start has been made. Here then is a 30 second checklist:

Outside: If the noticeboard is out of date and the grounds overgrown then the building is giving the impression of death and no-one will want to go near …

Inside: Solid wooden doors, long paths, dark porches, doors which don’t tell you whether to push or pull, poor signage and lack of disabled access are all things that seem small to us but which can put huge barriers in the way of a visitor. Remember, visitors will be embarrassed, nervous and unsure of themselves.

Welcome: The single most important factor in the first 30 seconds is the person you meet first on getting through the door … someone who smiles, is genuinely pleased to see people, and will enquire after the names of newcomers and show them to a seat is one of the most vital parts of a church.

Atmosphere: Walking into a buzz of conversation can seem friendly to those on the inside, but for a new person it can be intimidating because they feel that everyone has friends except them! The best atmosphere is one of prayer with music playing gently in the background so that the silence is compelling rather than embarrassing.

simple, but crucial. How welcoming is your church this Christmas?

update: just failed badly on the 30 second test at last nights service, what's the point in blogging this stuff if I then ignore it?

'Gate-crashing an exclusive club': welcome to church?

How welcoming is your church. Really? Honestly? Excellent piece from our Archdeacon:

......when I'm on holiday and go to the local parish church ....on the whole my experience has been - bluntly - that we Anglicans are not very good at welcome.

I'm spoilt as an Archdeacon ... when I go to a parish usually someone has been briefed to meet me, even carry my bags and make sure I get to the vestry and know what I'm doing. When I go to church on holiday (not in this diocese of course!) my experience has been generally dismal -- collecting books from a group of people chatting to one another and no doubt thinking theirs is a very friendly church, no indication as to where to sit ... we all dread the embarrassment of being told we’re in someone else's seat ... and no one cheerily saying, ‘Good morning, welcome, are you are visitor? Good to see you…. Let me introduce you to so-and-so.’ Frankly, I wouldn't want to go back to many of them as the experience felt more like gate-crashing an exclusive club than worshipping God with my brothers and sisters in Christ.

I'm making a plea for us to look at the ministry of welcome. This is not a grand initiative to recruit new congregation members; rather it is offering simple kindness, acceptance and hospitality to another human being. It does not have to be intrusive or cringe-making. It's better to risk getting it wrong and welcoming someone who you later discover has been coming to church for 40 years, than ignoring the stranger.

read the rest here

How is an Anglican Welcome different from a Methodist Welcome? Not a Lot.

It's both encouraging, and slightly discouraging, to find that both the CofE and the Methodist church now have a good set of resources to help church focus on becoming more welcoming: both having a welcoming building, and being a welcoming people.

The Anglican resource is the superb Everybody Welcome course, which has been around for a couple of years. We're using bits of it at our local Deanery Synod (gathering of local CofE church reps, once a term): using a DVD clip to highlight an issue, and sending everyone back to their churches with a couple of the checklists to fill in to help them review an aspect of the life of the church. Then at the next meeting, we'll hear back how they got on, what they're going to do about it, and highlight another issue.

The Methodists now have their own resource, First Impressions Count, which covers a lot of the same ground, using a lot of the same tools - video clips, checklists etc. It's a bit briefer and less in-depth, but looks good and covers a lot of helpful material. It may be easier to use 'off the peg', whereas Everybody Welcome needs more preparation, but also goes into more detail.

Whilst it's good to see both of these national churches recognising a need and filling it with a good resource, I wonder why 2 sets of people needed to do 2 separate projects producing 2 separate resources. There is so much common ground that it would surely have been easier to have adaptable versions of the same thing? We've managed it with Mission Shaped Ministry/Mission Shaped Intro...

Church Checklists: Is Everybody Welcome? Are You Sure?

How welcoming is your church? How welcoming is the building? How good is your publicity? Nice, general, impossible to answer questions, guaranteed to induce guilt and impede action.

Help is at hand. The excellent Everybody Welcome course has a series of checklists, full of specific questions on the quality of publicity, buildings, people and integration/nurture, which are really easy to use. Get a group together from your church, score yourself against each question, and work out what you're going to do about it.

Our Deanery (local group of Anglican churches) is going to start using them, highlighting one a term, asking churches to go away and fill them in, then feed back to the next meeting what they discovered and what they're going to do about it. It'll be interesting to see if building in the accountability works.

We've a recent history of Deanery meetings where we hear speakers on various important topics, but not a great deal happens as a result, so we're trying to gear the meetings up more to resource mission and ministry on the ground. Speaking personally, my goal would be that at every CofE church in the Yeovil area, any visitor will find a high quality of care and welcome, and have a positive experience of the people and the building.

There are even some resources on having your own Mystery Worshipper, including an introduction on how to set up the visit, and a very user-friendly questionnaire for the MW to use. If you'd like to have a go at being a Mystery Worshipper, and live somewhere near Yeovil (but not in it, everyone will know who you are), then please get in touch, would love to see (I think) how our churches came out of it!

From Dropping In to Staying In

Bob Jackson claims in his excellent 'Everybody Welcome' course that if churches could simply retain more of the people who come to visit, most of the would be growing not shrinking. What we need is not necessarily more mission activity, but to be better at integrating new members and helping them to belong.

A recent 'Resourcing Mission Bulletin' from the CofE had a study from Canterbury Diocese on churches that did well at retaining new members of all ages. Here are 10 factors which were seen as significant -

What was it about these churches that helped these newcomers not only to become committed members of their faith communities, but also be transformed from churchgoers into disciples of Christ? Interestingly, the same factors which help adults to do this also help teenagers and children:

1. The children were happy and enjoyed their activities:
Briony (11): It's nice doing all the activities every Sunday with your friends and you have a lot of fun. And you have fun and you're still learning.

2. The quality of the welcome they received overcame their initial nervousness:
Carl: It was very laid-back and very welcoming. I had a lot of fears of what it would be but they were kind of not there when I actually came to it and I actually sat down and walked around and people were talking to me, it was a very nice, great atmosphere.

3. A relaxed and friendly atmosphere, even where the worship was more formal:
Mary: It's very friendly and welcoming and easy to feel that you’re a part of; it's not that you've got to work at it. It's very comfortable.

4. The Christian faith was taught well and made relevant to life and its questions:
Chris: You can kind of slot in what the Bible's saying and what you're being taught into your life. I think that's quite important. I don't think that I would go if it had no relevance to my life at all.

5. Existing church members enfolded newcomers into their friendship networks:
Richard: My first impressions of going to a house group was they were nice; nice people. And some of them I've stayed in contact with I am real solid good friends with.

6. Newcomers were invited not only to participate in the life of the church, but to take on responsibilities of many different kinds:
Ben (16): Before it had been, like, ‘Oh I'm still giving this a try’; after three or four months they decided to lend me a drum kit? And then, like, apparently I was pretty good, so they drafted me into one of the bands? And that kind of kept me going out of duty, but then I also loved doing it at the same time?- so it was a sense of ‘I like doing this; I want to be here’.

7. After initial questions were resolved, new questions of faith were constantly raised and addressed:
Liz: He said to me: ‘You have to read it in the context in which it is written’. And so my reading started to expand and, subsequently, I read the Bible in the context in which it is written, and I still do to this day. Question things constantly.

8. Worship was inspiring, though very different in each faith community:
Lily (14): It helps me, like, focus on God. It gets rid of other distractions. 

9. Children began to make friends and grow into a faith of their own:
Maggie: With Macey (7), if she's upset or someone gets hurt, she'll quite often say, ‘Oh, can we pray about it’… she's learning to build a relationship with Jesus even though he's maybe not aware of that.

10. New members ended up with a new sense of identity, as a Christian who belongs to a particular faith community:
Kate: It's not just about Sunday morning for two hours; as well, it's very much a whole lifestyle.

How To Welcome New People

I guess this would apply to any group, not just churches.



This video is brought to you by the Ministry of the So Blindingly Obvious It Shouldn't Need Saying But Unfortunately It Does, via Church Sofa.

Back to Church Sunday - feedback from 2011

Initial responses from Back to Church Sunday this year are encouraging - the CofE is reporting roughly 14,000 guests at BCTS services among a sample of churches who took part in it*. Over 4,000 took part in it overall, and the report extrapolates the sample figures to estimate that nearly 80,000 extra people turned up on that Sunday. I imagine the actual figure is slightly less: churches reporting back are more likely to be those who had a succesful day (!) but that's still pretty good going.

I'd be intrigued to know if this is the kind of thing which works better when done every year, or more intermittently. It's only going to engage with people who once went to church (a sizeable, but shrinking number), but experience seems to show that if those people find a church which is relevant, accessible and welcoming, then many of them join it.

Here is one way to do BCTS, and do it well:
St Mary the Virgin, Yaxley, in the Diocese of St Edmundsbury and Ipswich, is an example of a church where Back to Church Sunday is part of a successful mission strategy: regular Sunday attendance has nearly quadrupled from nine to a viable 35, thanks to personal invitations from church members, and the pioneering work of the Revd Tiffer Robinson, who knocked on every door in the village of 400 people to personally invite everyone back to church.


In fact, why save it for September. I'm sure there are plenty of occasions during the year which people could be invited to. Let me think, there's something happening in December isn't there?

*Can I commend whoever is behind the information gathering. The CofE is often painfully slow at gathering stats - I guess there are other things to be getting on with! - but it's good to have qualitative feedback in time for it to make a difference. In case this dizzying speed is all too much, don't worry, in January 2012 it'll be back to normal, when we get the attendance data for 2010.

Top 10 Tips for Welcome

Having had a dig at marketing yesterday, there might still be one or two things we can learn from it..... Found this very snappy little vid on the Baptist Union website. The site has some great resources on mission and what they call 'crossing places' - places where the church engages the community on the community's terms, rather than on church turf.



A couple of other recommended bits from the website:
'Mission scene' newsletter - subscription here - a brilliant bit of work, lots of resources, ideas, links to mission initatives, training opportunities, ideas etc. I read it from one end to the other whenever it appears, which can't be said for most e-newletters I get!!

Mission Files - brief papers on a myriad of aspects of mission, and there's a full index with a brief description of each paper here. This is the kind of stuff that's scattered across dozens of diocesan websites in the CofE, so a huge well done to the Baptists for putting it all in one place, in such a well organised and accessible way.