Roster Role: Hab 10am Welcome Team

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
• 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 blue dispatch box for your congregation, with a pink 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:

  • Locate the offertory bags (Usually at St John's they're in the side store-room; at St Oswald's in the vestry; at St Alban's ???)

  • Start folding and assembling handouts. Handouts consist of

    • a white service sheet (1-3 sheets of paper each), folded

    • a yellow insert with the news and sermon outline

    • 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 so that they can greet anyone who happens to wander in during the service.

• The final task for the welcomers is to pass around the offertory bags. This is normally done during the final song. Don't forget to cover every pew! After the bags have been passed back through the congregation, they are taken to the front and placed on the table.