Roster Role: Ash 10am Welcomer & Bookstall

Welcoming people to church is a very important part of our ministry. It can be a very nerve-wracking thing to come to a strange church, let alone if no-one comes and talks to you. Failure to warmly welcome can put people off in the blink of an eye. The flip-side of this, of course, is that good welcoming does wonders. If people have a good experience at the door of the church, they are probably more likely to have a good experience in it. Welcoming is a profoundly Christian thing to do because God, in Christ, has welcomed us all into his family. There is no one who does not deserve to be warmly received when they come to church.

Time Commitment

• Frequency: Welcoming volunteers are generally put on the roster every 6 weeks or so.
• Before the service: arrive 25 minutes early

What does a win look like?

• Everyone who arrives has been greeted with a smile and feels welcome
• Information about Kids church or Creche is available on request
• Everyone is given the right handouts as they arrive
• Every newcomer who would like a welcome pack receives one
• The offertory bag is passed to everyone at the right time

Keys to winning

• All the handouts will be in the dispatch box for your congregation, with a blue manifest sheet that lists the contents – do look at this sheet!

• The welcomers' job begins before people start arriving for the service. At this point the things to do are:

  • Make sure all the front doors are open (!)
  • Grab the offertory bags from the front vestry
  • Start assembling handouts. Handouts consist of

    • a printed service sheet  with Church pic on the front

    • sometimes, extra leaflets or brochures – these will be mentioned on the manifest sheet

• As people arrive at church and you give them a handout, say hello. Make eye-contact. Give them a smile. It all sounds corny, but it makes a difference.

• Stay on the door for at least ten minutes after the service has started

• Early in the service there will be an official welcome, at which point it's a welcomer's job to hand out the Welcome Packs. When the welcome begins, come down to the front with the welcome packs and wait (it's not a bad idea to sit down in the front pew). Generally after the welcome packs have been mentioned the congregation will be invited to say hi to each other – this is your cue to walk slowly down the aisle, holding up the welcome packs and looking out for anyone who wants one. If new people don’t want them, that’s fine; we don’t need to put too much pressure on.

• After this, it is good for one welcomer to stay near the back pew so that they can greet anyone who happens to wander in during the service.

• In the last song (or designated by song/service leader)  the welcomers are to pass around the offertory bags.After the bags have been passed back through the congregation, they are taken to the front and placed on the table.

• The last task is to do a quick clean up of the pews after the service gathering service sheets and other handouts ready to be reused or recyced as necessary.  

• Any lost property can be placed in the Lost Property cupboard under the book stall.