I tell our ushers and greeters that I want visitors to feel welcomed AND expected.  It’s not enough to just be nice.  We need to be ready for the visitors.  We need to anticipate what they need and have it waiting on them.

I once stopped in a rural community to get something to eat at a restaurant that had been recommend to me, but when I got there the waitress just asked me what I wanted without any sort of menu, in hand or on the wall.  I had to ask for a menu and she had difficulty finding one.  She finally came back with a dusty, faded one.  She then told me it was out of date and tried to list from memory everything they served at the restaurant.  The waitress was nice and the food was good but I felt weird.  I felt like an outsider and a not very important one at that.

I once visited a church that evidently hadn’t had a visitor in a hundred years.  The very elderly ushers spotted me the minute I go out of my car and they knew I was a visitor because they had never seen me before AND I was under the average age of the members of the church which I guessed to be 182.  As I walked through the front door the second set of ushers had been notified that a VISITOR was in motion.  (I believe they yelled “code blue” or something.)  Anyway, I vividly remember them holding me at the door of the sanctuary as they rummaged around in a box of old papers looking for the “emergency” visitor packet with neon orange visitor tagging sticker.  They eventually found it but it was too late.  I already knew that visitors were an oddity for them, or at least it seemed that way to me.  The place simply couldn’t have seemed more lifeless and dead to me.

When people visit our churches, it should at least look like we have visitors all the time.  We should be ready to rock and roll.  We should do this for the comfort of our guests and to honor them but also to make sure that we are communicating that there’s life in this place and we’re ready for it.