A Solid “Why” Leads to a Better “What”
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...
Latest posts
How to Kill Your Darlings in Ministry
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....
4 Reasons Consistency Matters in Multi-Site
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&A: How Do I Seat People in a “Full” Auditorium?
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...
Top Ten Quotes: Lead with Hospitality
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...
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....
Why Training Matters (Even in a Smaller Church)
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...
Wanderers Pining for Home
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...
“This is Too Corporate.”
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...
Gaps vs. Overlaps
Lately I’ve been exercising my spiritual gift of poking my nose in where no one has asked me to (that was one of the gifts Paul texted about rather than sent an epistle about, and...
