So this past Sunday we had a friend’s day at church. The basic premise is that you invite friends to church. (As an aside, shouldn’t every sunday be friend’s day? Yes.) When your friends arrive they are greeted warmly, We talked about why friendship is so important. We had some food afterwards. Everything went really well. The service was one of the best that we have had in a while. The Food was a great time of fellowship. A couple that I invited came, had fun, made some great connections.
I used to work in retail and one thing that they always talked about was the secret shopper. The basic premise is that to get the best analysis of any program you have to examine it when it doesn’t know it’s being examined. And it usually provides pretty honest feedback. And knowing that there is a secret shopper about causes everyone to step up their game a little bit and make sure that they are always providing great customer service.
Well on sunday I thought I would employ this model of evaluation and I invited a friend whom no one at this church really knows, and who would be a good evaluator of the service, our overall friendliness and all that. And he had some really good things to say, overall, based on our discussion we were probably an 8 out of 10.
There was one hang up though. When we had our coffee break, we encourage people to meet people that they don’t already know. We are big on building relationships, so this is a great time to get relationships started, at least on a name and face basis. Well the family that was sitting right next to my secret shopper never even introduced themselves. That’s a problem. As a church we need to always be eyes open for new faces. And especially on a day when we are expecting new faces.
I think our church has come a long way since I got here as far as breaking out of our comfort zone and meeting new people, but we will always have room for improvement.
I think I should note that I didn’t do this to embarass my church or any fellow church-goer. But I wanted a real evaluation of our church’s friendliness factor.
My Prayer is that we would continue to grow in this area and become all that God wants us to be, and to see that the love of Christ can be expressed in something as simple as an introduction
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