In the registration form on a recent webinar on Improving your Church Hospitality, people were asked

“What is your biggest challenge in your church hospitality ministry?”

Most respondents were people leading or serving in Hospitality ministries, pastors and officers in church leadership, plus a few church planters and church consultants.

The answers fell into 5 common barriers where church’s struggle with their hospitality ministry.

1. Cliques

Respondents described their congregations as having people who

• don’t notice church visitors,
• friendly with each other,
• don’t care about welcoming outsiders,
• too busy fellowshipping with themselves.

Some examples can be seen

• A first time church visitor story
• No one said Hello to this Church Visitor

2. No Personal Ownership

Respondents indication concerns about how to share a vision for hospitality ministry

• So that the members would personally greet church visitors
• Taking responsibility for some of the systems of hospitality (training, recruiting, etc).
• To get beyond “Friendly with themselves”and greet visitors

This gets really how to cast Vision for Hospitality Ministries in a Church and increasing the visitor attentiveness of the church in general.

3. Not enough Volunteers

This was a big concern.  Church Hospitality ministries are labor intensive.  Think of all the people involved in

• Administration level of Hospitality Ministry.
• Recruiting the Greeter / Usher / Welcome Center Volunteers.
• Training the Church Greeter
• Training the Ushers.
• Training the Welcome Center Volunteers.
• Scheduling the volunteers
• Keeping volunteers motivated and so.

Finding, Recruiting, Training, Scheduling and maintaining all those volunteers is a lot of work.  That list doesn’t cover all of those who are tangential to the hospitality ministries like the

• Children’s workers
• Audio / Sound technicians
• Janitors / Custodians who keep the building looking clean and nice.

4. Lack of Adequate Training for Hospitality Ministry Volunteers

Respondents indicated that out on the open market for purchase is there is a lack of resources available for training.  This was two fold

a.  Not enough training materials

I’ve looked at a lot of resources currently available on Amazon.  I would agree.  There are some great books, but not ones that focus on training.

To help fill that need, I’ve created two ebooks that you can download immediately after purchase.

If a visitor leaves your church and says “No one said hello,”  you might need to grow this avenue of ministry

• How to Recruit and Train Greeters: www.ChurchGreeterTraining.com
• How to Welcome Church Visitors: www.WelcomeChurchVisitors.com

b.  Not enough training

Respondents point out that there is a great need to provide some kind of training, but have a hard time knowing where to start.  Each of my e-books give suggestions on how to do that.

5. Connecting Visitors to the Congregation

Can visitors connect relationally to the congregation?  How easy is it for them to break into the social networks of your congregation?

Respondents indicated that they needed help with ways to

• Get church visitor contact information.
• Contact visitors during the week after the service
• Help visitors come back a 2nd, 3rd, or 4th time.
• Check out this video about our own church assimilation experience

Let me ask you this?

If I were to get to a list of 10 barriers, what would you add?