Look, I don’t mean to be snarky. We here at Professional Mojo try hard to stay positive, otherwise it messes up the mojo, ya know?

But several of my friends, who have been out visiting churches, have come back with tales of woe. In fact, I have my own cautionary tale to share and then I’ll get to the meat of this.

When we first moved to Georgia, my husband and I were visiting churches. One week we visited church Y in our community. Not a single person said a word to us. Not. A. Word. The next week, we visited church X. The folks there were very welcoming. The churches had VERY similar names – some of the name was exactly the same.

The next week, someone knocked on our door. We answered the door and there stood a kindly looking couple with an apple pie. All they said was, “Hello. We’re Mr. and Mrs. Jones from ____ church.” The part of the name they used was exactly the same for both of the churches we had visited. Mrs. Jones said, “We appreciated you visiting and wanted to bring you this pie.” My husband then says, “Everyone at your church was so kind to us and now the pie. Thank you so much. Not every church we have visited has been so welcoming. We went to _____ church and no one said a word to us.” (Okay, so that may have been a little forward.)

Of course, you can see the punchline coming, right? Poor Mr. and Mrs. Jones were NOT from the kind church, but were from the church where no one said a word to us. Our (and their) mortification was complete. And this is a true story.

In retrospect, it was a valuable lesson Mr. and Mrs. Jones took back to their brothers and sisters in that church: there are some key reasons why, if you do manage to attract visitors, those people probably won’t return. We’re going to explore that in the next several posts.

1) The First Impression was a Turn Off: As a visitor, you drive into the parking lot of a new church. What do you notice first? Are there visitor parking spots? Have the regular members parked in the least desirable spaces and left the desirable spaces for those who might visit? Is it well-manicured and welcoming? Do the members of the church who are coming and going smile and wave and say hello? Or, do they walk in with their heads down or stand in little cliques?

Make the very first impression a welcoming one. Next time, we tackle #2: If you never want your visitors to return, just ignore them.

— Lee