Church: disassembling awkward

One of the best decisions our church ever made was to build the Welcome Center.

This is an interior, open space behind the Sanctuary.

The space is a perfect place for the congregation to gather after a worship service.

Prior to our kickoff Sunday, August 23, I spent some long hours in the Welcome Center putting together a small desk. The desk would be positioned near one of the Sanctuary exits.

The strategy is that our senior pastor, Gina, can direct visitors to the desk where a friendly church member will be waiting to greet the guest and answer questions.

I do not relish putting together furniture.

From my wife’s side of the family, there is a Christmas Eve story about my father-in-law struggling to put together a child’s Christmas present. My mother-in-law was a great teller of family stories. Every Christmas when the story was retold, the descriptions of this maddening challenge and how her dear husband was handling the madness just kept getting better.

I had a madness moment meltdown with this welcome desk. The instructions were quite sparse. Details weren’t clear or were just left out.

Of course, the lack of clear instructions occurs at exactly the wrong time. I called the manufacturer. They wanted the information off the shipping label.

I impatiently flipped over the large box that had housed the disassembled desk’s packaging. When I did this, styrofoam packaging spewed on to the Welcome Center floor.
By that time, styrofoam wasn’t the only thing spewing. Lots of inappropriate words were about to roll off the edge of my tongue.

Sensing my impatience, the technician on the phone quickly sent me information from a video that showed the step by step process for assembling the desk.

Once the link to the video arrived on my computer, I watched the person on the screen rapidly put the welcome desk together. I saw how he worked with two tiny plastic release clips inside the glide framing for the drawer. Without the video, I would not have been able to find those release clips.

Life can be tough to assemble too.

I can’t begin to imagine what it is like to be a visitor at an unfamiliar church on a Sunday morning.

I wonder if visitors dread the passing of the peace moment/greeting of a visitor as much as I do.

Congregations familiar with each other eagerly greet and chat. Our congregation loves this thirty to sixty seconds of interaction. The decibel level rises with this chatter. They love it so much that is tough to shift them back into the next section of the service.

In that roar of happy voices, I wonder if visitors are awkwardly ticking off those seconds waiting anxiously for the service to move forward.

Speaking for myself, I think those are awkward moments.

It is one thing to greet a visitor, but it is an added dimension to engage a visitor in a short conversation that doesn’t scare them off, including asking the wrong question.

I’ve been thinking about this past Sunday.

I sat way up in the balcony, a good place to nap.

A couple was sitting a couple of pews down from me that I didn’t know.

When the passing of the peace arrived, they looked around, yes, awkwardly.

Slowly, I and others in the balcony worked our way toward the couple.

Handshakes exchanged and peace be with you were spoken. But then, we fell silent and walked back to our pew seats.

The couple remained standing—awkwardly.

Just like I assembled that troublesome desk, I suspect that I need some assembling on how to better engage visitors on Sunday morning.

Specifically, how do I move beyond the awkward? How do I engage without alienating, or offending? How do I encourage a return visit or answer possible questions?

Churches spend gobs of money on communication—exterior banners, traditional marquees, electronic marquees, social media, postcards, static displays with information flyers, strategies to capture contact information from visitors, paper and on-line newsletters, videos, a gift, and on, and on, and on.

I don’t take much stock in exterior banners and marquees. I think the world moves too fast out on Forest Avenue.

Paper isn’t a favorite of younger generations. They prefer messaging utilizing technology. Some savvy seniors can handle that, but a few seniors still lean toward paper communication.

Eventually, the desk and I came to terms. I figured it out with a bit of coaching from a video, but with a real human being in it.

Resurrecting a church, its congregation so that it can attempt to grow is a “big rock” challenge.

But meeting that challenge is in the details—the small rocks. Disassembling the awkwardness for the member and the visitor is essential on every Sunday morning.

Disassembling that awkwardness is essential, critical, necessary, required for this reason—Hebrews 13:2: “Do not forget to show hospitality to strangers, for by so doing some people have shown hospitality to angels without knowing it.”

Even with limited skills, I was better at assembling that welcome desk than I was at disassembling the silent awkwardness between myself and visitors on Sunday morning.

I must do better.