The eCrozier

A clear proclamation of God’s redemption by our Lord Jesus grounds the growth of any church in its particular context. Yet, we must also be aware of the stance we take in such proclamation. It should be based an astute understanding of how people connect to and stay in a particular community. To do this, we have to avoid any wishful thinking or by clinging to certain sentimentalities we thought were true. Both stances are unhelpful.

One of the things we now know about human behavior and how we connect with others is that it’s not rational at the beginning. Our emotions, as David Brooks points out in The Social Animal, determine our first reactions to anything new. As much as we’d like to see ourselves as purely rational, we actually respond to new experiences emotionally. Only later might we reflect rationally. This means when people visit our churches, they need to make an emotional connection. And such emotional connections aren’t made to a new group of people as a whole. They are focused on the leader. In our case, the one up front wearing the unusual dress. If visitors can’t make an emotional connection with the clergy, then they likely won’t return. This doesn’t mean they must experience total adoration or that they must be swept off their feet by the clergy’s homiletical brilliance, but it does mean that visitors have to “connect” emotionally with the clergy. They have to be able to imagine the clergy as someone they could come to trust and relate to.

Now, we might think that it should be different; that visitors should connect with everyone in the liturgy and the pews, but what we know about human behavior doesn’t bear that out. The inconvenient truth is that the initial experience of visitors will be overwhelmingly determined by their emotional connection to the clergy. This reality should change the way we connect with visitors to church. Clergy need to put more time into preparation of not only their sermon, but also in how they preside, how they make announcements, indeed their entire interaction with “the public” on Sunday. Rather than be trapped in the sacristy corralling acolytes before the liturgy or chatting with parishioners after the liturgy about an upcoming committee meeting, the clergy ought to be out front greeting everyone, especially visitors, welcoming them, asking their names, and then making a point of following up with them after the liturgy to arrange to take them to lunch or to meet them for coffee in the next few days.

This, of course, places a significant burden on the clergy to make emotional connections. And that time meeting for lunch or coffee is when the connection can be solidified, not through a “sales job” on visitors, but by listening with genuine interest to their life story and their spiritual longings. That’s when the clergy can connect the visitors’ lives and their spiritual longings to the congregation’s ministry, helping them see how the church can be their partner on their spiritual pilgrimage.

Next week, in Part Two, I’ll address how lay leaders can be important companions in effective connection to visitors mainly by liberating their clergy from much of the liturgical and logistical housekeeping chores on Sundays. Stay tuned!

+Scott