When you get serious about creating inviting environments for your guests, you’re going to face difficult choices. You can make the insiders comfortable: they talk to friends they already know, they gravitate towards parking spaces...
We’ve long used the saying “The Why is More Important Than the What.” It’s one of our five Guest Services plumb lines, and the gist of it is this: if we know why our role...
Many of us have heard the phrase “kill your darlings,” a saying that originated from William Faulkner. Or maybe Oscar Wilde. Or possibly even Stephen King, which makes sense because of the whole kill thing....
I’ve long said that there are as many ways of doing multi-site church as there are multi-site churches. In fact, I’ll do you one better: take 100 multi-site churches, put them in a room, and...
Q: I would love to get your insight into how to usher people well in a full auditorium situation. We are finding it to be really difficult to fill every seat when people are standing...
Back during this year’s summer reading list, my fellow book nerd buddy Bob Adams tipped me off to what would become one of my favorite books of the summer. Taylor Scott is an alum of...
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....
This is the next installment in our ongoing “Small Church” series, which looks at guest services through the lens of the smaller congregation: those with 150 or fewer people in attendance each week. See the...
A couple of weeks back I wrapped up my official summer reading list, capping off the literary journey with Beth Moore’s excellent memoir All My Knotted-Up Life. (Side note: I want to write as beautifully...
I heard those four words again not long ago. I was with a group of church leaders in another state, and the topic of training guest services volunteers came up. One of the staff repeated...
