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On the front end of outreach is connecting with visitors. A call for reader responses to The Lutheran indicated these practices:
• Providing an inviting and hospitable environment in which different kinds of people feel welcome.
• Providing a safe, loving and comfortable nursery where children feel important and cherished.
• Welcoming visitors with genuine care and compassion, not just with a
one-time polite greeting. Making visitors feel like their presence
really makes a difference.
• Intentionally following up with
visitors through phone calls and other techniques, like delivering
home-baked goods to a visitor's home.
• Providing ministries that
allow people of all ages to grow spiritually and use their gifts fully
in the life of the church.
• Getting new members connected early with other people and involved in ministry, such as small groups.
When the gathering music is Billy Joel's She's Always a Woman to Me, you just know the worship will be anything but ordinary.
But
out of the ordinary is how it has to be, says Barbara Zielinski,
mission developer of Extended Grace, a faith community along Lake
Michigan's east shore.
"We're the place for people who are on
the edge," she says. "The church needs to create places for people who
feel nobody wants them. Christ always sat with the outsider. That's
where we're called to be." These 30 worshipers are here to find and
experience Extended Grace, and by all accounts they do.
Every
Sunday at about 5 p.m. they saunter into this Grand Haven, Mich.,
building behind a day care and Pizza Hut. After helping themselves to
coffee, tea or Hawaiian Punch, the men, women and children settle into
donated couches or sit behind tables. Clad in jeans and sweatshirts,
they spend the next three hours participating in worship orchestrated
by Zielinski and eat a meal prepared by her husband, Sigmond. Most will
stay to discuss the evening's theme led by Zielinski or a guest.
But
before they do, there's a check-in time, giving a taste of the joys and
struggles of these worshipers. Unemployed job seekers give updates, two
birthdays are celebrated and a woman announces her enrollment in a Dale
Carnegie course (applause). A visitor attending with friends says,
among other things, her heat has been turned off. She's partly here to
warm up. "Mary" is here every week, driving 30 miles from Grand Rapids.
"I had never attended church very much. I always felt if they knew the
real me I wouldn't be welcome," she says.
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© 2013 Augsburg Fortress, Publishers
