Rector’s letter
THE RECTOR WRITES
Dear friends
‘Everybody Welcome’
What makes a good department store? It begins with advertising: communicating the fact that you are there and have something people might want. Then it’s about physical appearance and facilities: does the approach to the store look attractive? Can you see into the store from outside? Are the premises clean, light, airy, warm? Are there toilets? Can you get refreshments? Are there products I actually want? Do other shoppers look like people like me – do I feel I belong here? Not all department stores pass all those tests. But the good ones do. Their aim is to get you to feel relaxed and not anxious, because they know a relaxed shopper is likely to spend more money.
But there’s something else as well. It’s customer care. Customer care is what separates the good department store and the best. Customer care is about staff who smile, look pleased to see you and offer to help. Getting customer care right is a fine line: too pushy and intrusive and shoppers may go out of the door and not come back. But equally, a lack of customer care – and being ignored – has the same effect. We’ve all seen shop assistants standing around talking amongst themselves while customers try to get some ‘service’.
Churches are much like department stores in many respects. They have to communicate their existence and what they can offer. The approach to a church has to look at least neat and tidy. Ideally, people should be able to see into the building from outside (we underestimate how forbidding large, heavy wooden doors can be). The physical layout and the facilities have to be attractive to newcomers: heating, lighting, toilets, kitchen are the basics nowadays. Not all churches provide all of these, but the good ones do. In addition they offer a product – good worship in which people participate and clearly value – which encourages others to join in.
But what separates the best churches from the merely good is the quality of customer care. When you go into a church as a newcomer, is there anyone there to smile at you, greet you, welcome you? There may be people giving books out: do they for the most part have their backs to you, too busy or too flustered to do more than thrust a pile of unfamiliar
books into your hands? If you’re not sure what the Peace is, or whether you can receive a blessing, is there anyone you can turn to to ask?
What about after the service? If there are refreshments, does anyone invite you, take you, talk to you, introduce you to other people, or are you left on your own to make a bolt for the door as quickly as you can? Are there any other people like you in the congregation, or are you the only mother with young children, or the only apparently single person? People may tell you it’s a friendly church, but does that mean the regulars are friendly with each other, without realising how unwelcoming they can appear to an outsider?
And then there’s the bottom line: after your first experience of a church, will you come back next week? Research suggests that less than 10% of people who try a church for the first time will actually join. And the biggest factor is the poverty of welcome they receive, and the difficulty of finding how to move from simply attending a service to belonging to that worshipping community as a valued and valuable member. Working on welcome and integration, on the retention of those who try out a church, is what distinguishes churches who are serious about wanting to grow and those that are not.
More and more churches are selecting and training Welcome Teams whose primary role this is. But the welcoming of newcomers is a matter for the whole congregation. And of course it only takes one person to spoil a welcome.
Department stores invest huge amounts in training staff in customer care, because they want people to come back to the shop. Churches, too, have to take customer care seriously if they want newcomers to be back in church the following week, or ever again.
Keith Maudsley
