And to godliness, warm friendliness, and generous love. With these qualities actively growing in your life, you won’t be unproductive and fruitless in your knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ. 1 Peter 1:7

In a Twitter poll, first-time visitors were asked why they chose not to return to churches they visited only once. ‘Unfriendly church members’ came in second to the top in reasons visitors never return (Number 1 was ‘Having a stand up and be welcomed in the worship service’—no surprise there!)

Since as I said last time, I’ve been on the road all summer and visited a lot of churches, I wasn’t surprised that ‘Unfriendly church members’ rated so high. But the enlightening thing was the number of respondents who included ‘non-genuine friendliness’ as what really bothered them. In other words, the visitors could tell the ‘friendliness’ of some of the congregants was a sham.

In contrast, at one smallish church on the east coast we visited, two different people getting out of their cars saw us arrive in the parking area and came over to welcome us and offered to help us find where we needed to be, and to answer any questions we had. They weren’t the welcoming committee. You couldn’t pay staff to be that friendly. (So I ask myself if I would be that friendly if our roles were reversed. Would I even notice?) By the way, that church didn’t have greeters at the door… they didn’t need them with all the honestly friendly and helpful people we met.

Another huge church on the west coast, we were still in the parking area when a woman came over and introduced herself. She had seen us at a meeting before and told us how blessed she had been to sit behind us. She loved her church and it was genuine. I don’t think we could have been made to feel more welcome—certainly not by the assigned greeters at the door.

Which brings me to another lesson I’ve learned. Stop telling me that you are a friendly church. Either the church is friendly and it’s obvious or you’re not. Telling people that you are friendly is like telling people you are humble.

It’s a dead give-away that you probably aren’t. Instead, make it your goal that visitors walk away saying, “You know, that’s a friendly church.” Because it doesn’t matter that you think you’re friendly. It matters that visitors walk away with that impression. And marketing your brand as something you’re not only draw attention to what you’re not.

By the way, last time I mentioned that every church seems to have at least one person who corners visitors and perhaps means well, but is too full of their own interests… visitors are often at a loss as to how to extricate themselves gracefully from these friendly, but socially graceless people. As a good visitor, you don’t want to be rude, but perhaps listening to endless chatter about conspiracy theories, political hobby-horses, or fishing lures isn’t really your idea of meet n’ greet. Remember, Jesus loves these socially-challenged people, and we need to, too.

I saw this handled well in one church where someone hung out with one of these individuals who apparently had a reputation for buttonholing visitors and smoothed the interaction immensely, allowing the socially-challenged man to talk about his passion (Marvel comics) but recognizing the visitor’s lack of interest in the topic, quickly eased the conversation to the spiritual needs of the visitor. I liked that. It honored everyone and got around a sticky visitor situation.