Telling Stories That Create Stories
Recently I led a virtual training for a group of volunteers at a church in Texas. The following post is a paraphrase of one of the participant’s questions and the discussion that came out of it.
When creating a healthy guest culture in our churches, one of the biggest challenges we have to overcome is helping the average congregant to be aware of the guests that are among us. We all have a tendency to focus on our own comfort, to fail to be alert, and to gravitate to our old friends at the expense of our new friends.
So how do we lead our congregation to realize that there are new people all around us? (Or, at the very least, there is the potential for it?)
It’s simple: we have to believe in the power of stories.
Stories stick in a way that statistics never will. Stories evoke emotion and feeling. They shake people out of slumber. The create excitement, enthusiasm, and a rallying cry that helps a congregation declare this is who we are and what we do.
That’s why I believe every guest services team needs a story repository: both the classic tales of people who were served well by your team, and the new stories of life change we are seeing due to the power of the gospel and the focus on new people.
Three groups who need to hear your stories:
1. Staff
Almost every month in our all-staff meeting, there is a story told of some individual or group of people whose lives have changed because someone from our congregation cared enough to befriend them and point them to Jesus. Sometimes these come directly from the person who did the investing, and sometimes they’re unpacked by the person who was invested in. One of our most memorable staff meetings from the past year included the testimony of a former skeptic who has now fully embraced faith in Jesus. She detailed all the steps along the way of how different staff members and congregants befriended her, answered her questions, and encouraged her to keep seeking answers in scripture.
2. Volunteers
I’ve told you before that we push out a survey to all of our first-time guests who give us their contact information. Those answers are compiled weekly and redistributed to our Guest Services Directors at each campus. Often, those surveys include fresh stories of people who were impacted by the intentional service of our team members. We encourage the Guest Services Directors to take snippets of that feedback and celebrate those stories in Volunteer Headquarters. These are as close to real-time celebrations as we’ll get, as often those stories are just a week or two old. (And the best stories are when guests call out specific volunteers by name. To paraphrase someone else…what we celebrate is what they’ll replicate!)
3. Congregation
…and now we’re back to the original question. If we’re going to create a healthy guest culture, there can’t just be the ground war of stories to staff and volunteers. We have to lead an air war for our entire congregation on Sunday mornings.
What you’ll notice in this progression of stories is that the size of the crowd dictates the details of the story. We want to be guardians of people’s trust and not give identifying information unless we have explicit permission. But often, our teaching pastor or campus pastors will use stage time to highlight the work that God is doing in the life of someone new to our congregation…and how God is using specific congregants to facilitate that life change. Whether it’s a Guest Services volunteer befriending a first timer and inviting them out for coffee and an eventual discipling relationship, or a family assisting a single mom they met in the congregation, or a college student who became a believer and immediately began sharing the gospel with her friends, we want to highlight those stories of insiders befriending outsiders.
Stories are powerful. They capture the imagination and give us an “I can do that, too” moment. How can you capture and repeat stories to raise the guest awareness culture in your congregation?
