Have you become nose blind?

Do you remember what it was like when you first visited Christ Church (or any church, for that matter)? Over the years, I’ve visited dozens of churches and had a variety of different experiences, both positive and negative. One particularly memorable experience was when I first visited a 30-person church that met in a small community theater. Since most people were older and weren’t as familiar with technology, I was asked to run the worship service slides after being there all of 5 minutes! It may sound odd, but it was actually nice to be immediately able to use my gifts in serving there. I eventually ended up serving as a pastoral intern there before heading to seminary.

Christ Church is much larger than that 30-person church, and with two services, we don’t always know who’s a first-time guest and who’s been coming for months (or even years)! Personally, I’ve experienced Christ Church to be very warm and welcoming, and I’ve heard that from a number of people who have joined in the last couple of years. But there’s always room for us to continue developing our welcoming muscles. So here are two thoughts to help:

Noseblindness. You know when you walk into a particularly pungent room and the smell hits you in the face? Then, after a while, you become used to it and it takes someone else coming in for you to remember there’s a distinct aroma. Churches are like that too (though not just with smells). Once we’ve been in a place like Christ Church for a while, we forget all the things a first time guest doesn’t know. Where is the nursery? What if I’m hard of hearing and need an assistive listening device? Why are all those kids running up front after the benediction? Thankfully, we have great greeters and ushers and deacons and Welcome Center people to help. But what if we all fought through our noseblindness by remembering our first visit so that we could anticipate the needs of first time guests?

Rebecca McLaughlin’s 3 Rules. Last Sunday I referred to a tweet from Rebecca McLaughlin about her husband’s 3 Rules for Engagement at Church (here it is in a more developed article). Those rules are: 1) An alone person (or couple) in our gathering is an emergency, 2) Friends can wait, and 3) Introduce a newcomer to someone else. As I said Sunday, it’s good that we catch up with friends on Sunday and some guests prefer being able to quietly observe. But the principle is that we should prioritize pockets of rich fellowship throughout the week so that we can make space for extending the welcome we’ve received from God to guests on Sundays. Bert Froysland was a great example of this, and you can hear it in this video clip of him.