Gary L. McIntosh - Beyond the First Visit: The Complete Guide to Connecting Guests to Your Church

Dr. Gary L. McIntosh is a coach who knows the fundamentals of church life and outreach. Every sport requires excellence with athletic fundamentals. All great ball players can throw and catch. When it comes to congregational outreach the fundamentals are inviting, welcoming, and following up with guests. Beyond the First Visit is an essential training tool on how to implement these fundamentals.

Dr. John W. Ellas, Center for Church Growth

Most churches evaluate themselves from the insiders perspective. Gary McIntosh has learned, as a church consultant with years of experience, to see the churches he visits from the first time guests point of view.... We only have one chance to make a first impression!

Eddie Gibbs, Fuller Theological Seminary

Gary McIntoshs new book fills a long-standing void. No one (to my knowledge) since Lyle Schallers Assimilating New Members, published in 1978, has addressed the challenge of effectively including new people in the churchs life with this much background, savvy, and precision. This book will enable tens of thousands of churches to develop a game plan for reaching, welcoming, including, and developing new people in the local churchs life.

George G. Hunter III, distinguished professor of Evangelism and
Church Growth, Asbury Theological Seminary

This book is great! Its filled with practical ideas to tackle every local churchs greatest challenge: how to connect and disciple new people. We have already begun to implement many of Garys excellent ideas.

Dr. Gary D. Kinnaman, author and senior pastor,
Word of Grace, Mesa, AZ

Other books by Gary L. McIntosh

Church That Works

Biblical Church Growth

The Exodus Principle

Look Back, Leap Forward

Make Room for the Boom... or Bust

One Church, Four Generations

One Size Doesnt Fit All

Staff Your Church for Growth

Evaluating the Church Growth Movement

With Glen Martin

Creating Community

Finding Them, Keeping Them

The Issachar Factor

With Robert Edmondson

It Only Hurts on Monday

With Sam Rima

Overcoming the Dark Side of Leadership

With R. Daniel Reeves

Thriving Churches in the Twenty-first Century

BEYOND THE
FIRST
VISIT

THE COMPLETE GUIDE
TO CONNECTING
GUESTS TO YOUR CHURCH

GARY L . MCINTOSH

2006 by Gary L. McIntosh

Published by Baker Books
a division of Baker Publishing Group
P.O. Box 6287, Grand Rapids, MI 49516-6287
www.bakerbooks.com

Printed in the United States of America

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any meansfor example, electronic, photocopy, recordingwithout the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

McIntosh, Gary, 1947

Beyond the first visit : the complete guide to connecting guests to your
church / Gary L. McIntosh.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references (p. ).

ISBN 10: 0-8010-9184-5 (pbk.)

ISBN 978-0-8010-9184-1 (pbk.)

1. Church attendance. 2. Church growth. 3. Church marketing. 4. Church work. 5. HospitalityReligious aspectsChristianity. I. Title.

BV652.S.M35 2006

254'.5dc22

2006010300

Scripture is taken from the New American Standard BibleUpdated Edition, 1999 by The Zondervan Corporation; the Lockman Foundation 1960, 1962, 1963, 1968, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1975, 1977, 1995.

Portions of this book are reprinted from The Exodus Principle (Broadman and Holman, 1995) by Gary L. McIntosh. Used by permission.

CONTENTS

14. Design a Strategy

1
EMPTY THE CAT LITTER BOX

I have felt lonely, forgotten or even left out,
set apart from the rest of the world.
I never wanted out. If anything I wanted in.

Arthur Jackson

W henever company is coming over to our house, my family goes through a regular ritual called getting ready for company. For us it involves such things as cleaning the bathrooms, emptying the trash cans, vacuuming the floors, dusting the counters, and, most important, changing the cat litter boxes. All our effort is expended in preparation for our guests. We want our house to look the best, and we spare no amount of effort to see that it is ready. No doubt you can identify with this experience.

Growing churches also spend a significant amount of time getting ready for their companyvisitors. For them it involves such things as preparing an attractive worship service, organizing teams of greeters, cleaning the church facility, offering refreshing snacks, and, most important, creating a welcoming environment. These churches believe they have only one chance to make a first impression, and they want the visitor to experience a friendly welcome.

Were a Friendly Church

If you were to survey churches and ask them to list their strengths, almost every one would include, Were a friendly church. I know this for a fact as I have asked this question of more than one thousand churches during the last twenty-five years. Its interesting that in every one of the churches I coached, someone either wrote on a survey or stated verbally that they believed their church to be a friendly place. It did not matter if the individuals were attending churches in danger of closing down, in the midst of twenty-year-long plateaus, or bursting forth in growth. They all felt their church was a friendly one. Apparently, regardless of the state of their health or their size, most churches consider themselves to be friendly.

However, if you were to have surveyed the visitors who attended those same churches, you might have been given an opposite perception. For example, in one church I consulted with a few years ago, I discovered that during a two-year period only 3 visitors out of 197 had chosen to remain in the church. Apparently, more than 97 percent of that churchs visitors did not feel very welcomed.

Often church visitors report that churches are cold, unwelcoming, and not very friendly. How is it that two people can experience the same event and feel so differently about it? How can members believe their church is friendly, while newcomers experience an unfriendly atmosphere? The answer is perception. Here is how it works. People who attend a church regularly look at the issue of friendliness from the inside out. From their perspective, they are experiencing a friendly atmosphere. They know other people and other people know themby name. When they have a personal need, their friends take notice and respond with appropriate action. Their perception is that the church is a friendly place.

In contrast, visitors view the issue of friendliness from the outside in. They are experiencing a totally new atmosphere. They may not know other people and other people may not know them. If they have needs, they are rarely noticed, let alone responded to with appropriate action. So visitors may perceive the church as an unfriendly place.

If guests
to our church
dont think
were friendly,
we arent.

Such different perceptions remind us that beauty is in the eye of the beholder or, in this case, friendliness is in the eye of the beholder. Another way to say it is