This is the first of a three-part series. I’m going to challenge Senior Leaders on three important issues. Please take the opportunity to read this article and the other two that will follow.
These are the areas of many, many lost opportunities to grow a church.
- Not greeting Visitors.
- Members not having anything to do (!@#$!@) WHAT!
- Your Community not being involved in helping to grow your church.
Let’s start with the visitors.
- Visitors should “always be greeted”. There should always be a church member assigned to greet visitors even visitors who come well after worship has started. Someone may even have to be assigned to greet during the entire service! OK, so not greeting visitors most likely is not the sole reason for visitors not returning, but coupled with other things that might happen while they are at your church, a visitor just might be deterred from coming back.
- Visitor’s contact information should “always” be taken on Sundays and “all” other church activities. If you are not doing this, set up a system to do this. How to Grow a Church Step 2 tells all about how to take care of precious visitors.
- Visitors should “always” be followed up no later than 4 days after meeting them. Why? Because this is the most opportune time to invite a visitor back; pray for their needs, find out their needs, answer questions they might have about your church, tell them about upcoming events … and the list goes on! Almost all churches will tell you they follow up. But do they? And how long do they take to follow up? Sometimes there needs to be follow-up on the person who is assigned to follow-up!
And that’s that…
God Bless,
Dr. Tillman
