Never Lose the Guest Mentality
When we serve in, work for, or repeatedly show up at the local church, it’s all too easy to gain a sense of familiarity with how the whole thing works: we know the insider language. We know when to stand and when to sit. We know the bathroom that never runs low on toilet paper.
And that’s fine, as far as familiarity goes. If we’re a part of a church family, we want to have a certain measure of comfort, of belonging, of safety.
But that sense of familiarity can wreak havoc on our guest culture. What’s familiar to us is foreign to them. What’s comfortable to us can be confusing for them. What brings calm to us can stir up anxiety in them.
That’s why I encourage our staff, volunteers, and attendees to never lose the guest mentality. That means that whenever we walk into a church, we have to think like a guest. Whenever we go into any other establishment, we have the opportunity to use that experience to help ramp up (or tone down) our own welcome into our own doors.
As my friend Mark Waltz said in his first book:
A helpful exercise in retraining your senses is to evaluate an unfamiliar place. The next time you dine out, take a notebook with you and plan to do more than eat a meal. Be the critic. Record impressions about the parking area, the building, your host or hostess, wait time, service, food, and ambiance. How did you feel about the entire experience? What wowed you, if anything? The goal is not to see what you can find wrong, but rather to train yourself to see from a guest’s perspective (after all, you are one).
If I can bless you with something that – if I’m honest – is sometimes going to feel like a curse, it’s going to be the inability to detach from the guest experience. I go through very few worship services or outside-the-church consumer experiences without evaluating my treatment as a guest. It’s not because I feel like I deserve to be treated well, it’s because I believe that the gospel demands that we treat our guests well. And thinking through my own experience from their perspective helps make that happen.
So as you observe your own worship service, visit a new store, check out the hot new restaurant, or hit up the new vacation destination, do it through a new set of eyes. Redeem your experience and use it to honor those that God is sending your way. Think like a critic: not a critic who deserves better but a critic who wants to serve better. I promise it will change both the way you are served and the way that you serve.
