Kay Kotan's Blog, page 11

Plan After Christmas Now

As we enter into Advent, I doubt you want to hear about the need to plan for January now!  Afterall, there is so much to do over these next weeks – Cantata practices, children’s Christmas program rehearsals, the annual women’s cookie exchange, gift collection for at-risk families in the community, and final touches on Christmas Eve service(s).  How could we possibly be thinking about January?

We all know that Christmas and Easter are the times when the church is most likely to have guests in worship services.  This is especially true for Easter Sunday and Christmas Eve services.  Knowing this common trend, it is important to prepare.  There are two aspects to this preparation.  The first is making sure the guest has a good experience.  Check out the previous blog on “Warm and Friendly Encounters” for tips to ensure your guest has a great first impression of their experience.  The second aspect of this preparation is to consider what will be offered to the guest beyond the worship experience.  What will encourage a guest to take another step within the faith community?

Too often, we are so concentrated on Christmas itself that we are not thinking beyond December 24th or 25th as though those dates were the finish line.  For guests, we have to remember that this is perhaps their starting line.  If we offer a guest nothing beyond the worship experience, we may likely miss an opportunity to provide the guest a next faithful step s/he may be searching for even if they don’t recognize it.  Something led that guest to the Christmas Eve service.  It is up to us as the church to provide the next steps for that guest who is searching. 

When we consider what to offer a guest, we may need to think beyond what ministries already exist. Take a hard look at current ministry offerings.  Are they truly guest friendly?  Guest friendly does not only mean that the people involved are friendly (of course they are).  Guest friendly means it is an easy first step for guests where participants involved are new faith or at least new to the church and have shared affinities.  New people connect best with other new people.  The next step may be something that doesn’t currently exist or something that you’ve ever offered before.  What would connect best with a guest today?

Consider a sermon series that is seeker friendly.  Address real life issues that are struggles for the people in your community.  Current research indicates that many are struggling with mental health issues such as depression and anxiety.  People are re-examining life, its purpose, its meaning, and how to have impact.  And finally, relationships are always a great guest-friendly topic including parenting children or teens, struggling marriages, parenting our parents, and parenting adults.

Plan now for January so you will be able to share these exciting plans with your Christmas guests.   Otherwise, you will likely miss the opportunity to provide next steps and connection into the life of your church for your guests.  Trust me, it is well worth the investment!

Easy on the Church Talk

While working with a wonderful church team recently, I asked the team what they might offer as a handoff (next small step after an initial introduction to the church through an outreach event) that wasn’t “come to worship.”  With the best of intentions and purest of heart, one woman lovingly replied, “But they just don’t know how much they would bless us if they came to worship with us.”

Frankly, I had to pause for a moment to make sure I responded with the same love and kindness that she had to my question.  My gut reaction was to point out that our neighbors are not there to bless us.  Instead, if we are to build relationships with our neighbors, we would want to be thinking more about how we might bless our neighbors.  After pausing to collect my thoughts, I first acknowledged how much she and the church team obviously desired to see new neighbors attending their worship service.  I went on to ask what might happen if we were to reverse engineer her comment and consider how we might be able to bless the neighbors.  She paused for a moment and then her eyes suddenly became very large as she realized what had happened.  The church is so used to expecting people to come to us and be a part of what we do, she had not even realized she was still stuck in that paradigm even though that was the topic of the small group.

It isn’t that church people are not trying to reach new people.  It isn’t that many churches are working hard.  We just often get stuck in our methods still believing the methods of bygone days and years might still work.  We also forget that we often speak a foreign language to the unchurched people who now represent most people.  Another church group I was working with talked about inviting the neighbors to the hanging of the greens or Epiphany.  Much of our U.S. population would likely not understand what they were being invited to if you mentioned those events.  If a seeker or a person new to faith were to show up for worship, they might also hear unfamiliar churchy words like narthex, prelude, doxology, tithes, acolyte, chalice, liturgist, pulpit, chancel, etc.

And we do not even realize we do it.  We have lived sometimes our whole lives hearing and speaking these words that they seem like “normal” everyday words to us churched people.  But, for those outside the church, these are foreign words that often make our neighbors feel disconnected and uncomfortable.  If we wouldn’t use the word in the local grocery store, we probably should minimize the use of the word anytime a potential new person could be listening.  Or if we feel we must absolutely use these “churchy” words, we need to define them to bridge the gap.

As we prepare to receive guests during this Advent season, be mindful of your church language.  You never know who is listening.  Don’t allow our church language to be a barrier for building relationships with new people.  Your grocery store language will do quite nicely!

Taking Christmas to the Community

Advent is a special time for the church – as it should be!  The church calendar is full of activities such as practices and events like the hanging of the greens, the Children’s Nativity Play, the Christmas Cantata, the cookie exchange, Christmas caroling, Sunday school class parties, staff luncheons, special fundraisers, collection of gifts for families or friends in need, special advent small group studies, and so much more.  It is a wonderful time of year!  And, it is a hectic time of year.  This is especially true when you add all these extra holiday happenings to the regular church calendar events and to everyone’s already personally jam-packed schedule and calendar!  Pack on the pandemic layer to this already boiling pot of chaos, and you have one heaping potential burn-out mess.

What if we paused all those extra church events this year?  I know, that sounds like crazy talk.  But, just hear me out if you would please.  This world has gone through some crazy stuff these past couple of years.  There is a mental health crisis.  People are worn out, burned out, fried up, and worn slick.  Folks are lonely, depressed, anxious, fearful, and hopeless like never before in our lifetimes.  Our neighbors are searching for community, hope, joy, peace, comfort, a sense of purpose, well-being, and belonging.  Church, that is exactly what we as the Body of Christ have to offer!  But we have to stop the fury of activity and focus inside the building to first take notice.  We then have to be willing to take the next step and go to the community.  Be with the community.  Gone are the days of expecting the community to walk into the church.

Church, it is time to take Christmas into the community!  Rather than spending all the time investing in only those already gathered in the church family, let’s challenge one another to start an advent small group study with unchurched friends, co-workers, and neighbors in one another’s home, pubs, libraries, online, restaurants, parks, back porches, (for those in warmer climates), malls, etc.  Post notices on social media about inviting new friends to join.  Choose a resource that is seeker friendly that requires no preparation and easy to facilitate such as the devotional I wrote with my friend, Rachel Gilmore, Voices of Christmas.  It is super easy to both follow and facilitate.  It provides options for daily and weekly reflections.  It even provides a launch into the new year with a vision board exercise that could easily convert to an on-going group experience if the group were to decide to continue.

By slowing down, investing in others, spending time reflecting on what this season is really about, and building relationships with people outside the faith you will likely find a more meaningful and less stressful Christmas than you’ve had in quite some time.  And likely, you and your small group will be blessed beyond your imagination for taking Christmas outside the church into the community.  Will you join me?

Is Your Church Providing Warm & Friendly Encounters?

Every church has a desire to reach new people.  Every church wants to be friendly.  Most churches believe they are friendly.  Many churches are friendly, but a great deal of those are friendly with their own people.  Or those friendly churches provide a nice initial greeting, but there is nothing beyond the initial friendly reception.

In MissionInsite’s MinistryInsite Report, one of the trends I am noticing in mission fields of varying contexts across the United States is the desire and preference of seekers looking for warm and friendly encounters when it comes to a desired interaction with religious communities.  Did you hear that, church?  Warm and friendly encounters!  This preference is coming in at the very top of the preference list in report after report in working with churches across the country.  People in your neighborhoods are looking for a place where they are genuinely welcomed and accepted without judgement.  People are seeking places to build community.  The church should and can be the place for people to find warm and friendly encounters!

How would a first-time guest experience your church?  Would they experience a warm and friendly encounter?  What feels warm and friendly to those of us that have been around the church for a while who know the people, what to expect, where to go, etc. is much different than those who are experiencing the church for the first time. 

Here are just a few tips to get you started as you consider first-time guests experiences:

How easily accessible is the church?  For onsite experiences, consider ease in finding worship times, exterior signage, guest parking, exterior hospitality, interior hospitality, pre-service atmosphere, guest-friendliness in worship (i.e., greetings, announcements), relevance and context of the message and music, post-worship hospitality, next steps and connection, and follow up post worship.For online experiences, how seeker friendly is your website?  Other social media?  Is it up to date?  How easy is it to find and access a worship experience?  Is the worship experience experiential and relational?  Is the worship experience designed for an online experience or video of the onsite experience?  Does the online attender have the same opportunities to engage such as prayer requests, greetings, interaction with others, opportunity to provide contact information, being invited to service opportunities, next steps for discipleship, questions answered, opportunity to give, connections and relationships with others, and feeling seen and loved by others?

As we enter into November, the Advent season is close behind.  And Advent is the season in which churches have the opportunity to receive more guests than any other time of the year other than possibly Easter.  Are you ready to provide the best possible guest experience?  Prepare now to provide warm and friendly encounters for your Advent guest experiences!