I wish EVERY church member in America could read this article by Rick Ezell. This came to me through one of the blogs I read regularly and I wanted people I know to read it, as well. I share it in hope that Christians might take to heart the importance of being friendly to guests and making a good first impression. If we want visitors to return to our services then we have to be a hospitable people. All of us can do better at this ministry (including me) as it opens the door for us to minister God's saving message.

(I have emphasized some words in blue to draw your attention to them!)

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Five Significant Facts about First-Time Guests

by Rick Ezell

You may be the most skilled preacher and your church may have excellent small groups or the best children’s ministry in the city, but your first-time guests will never know unless they make a second or third visit. Healthy and growing churches pay close attention to the people they count as members, as well as those people who are not yet a part of the flock. These churches know that new people are the lifeblood of a growing church. Like a spigot, they want to keep the valve open for the flow of new people, and most importantly, they want to ensure that nothing impairs or cuts off the flow of new people to the church.

With that in mind, pastors need to be aware of five significant facts about first-time guests looking for a church home.

1. Visitors make up their minds regarding a new church in the first ten minutes of their visit.

Often, before a first-time guest has sung an inspiring song or watched a compelling drama or viewed a well-produced video vignette or heard a well-crafted sermon, they have made up their mind whether or not to return. In fact, if you ask most church leaders, far more time and energy are spent on the plan and execution of the worship service, with only minimal time spent on preparing for the greeting and welcoming of the first-time guest, which is equally if not more important. Most pastors would rather not hear this: The church’s ability to connect with first-time guests is not dependent on you, but on those first lines of people who represent your church.

• Are parking attendants in place?
• Is there appropriate signage?
• Are your ushers and greeters performing the “right” job?
• Is the environment you take for granted user-friendly and accepting to guests?

2. Most church members aren’t friendly.

Churches claim to be friendly. In fact, many churches put that expression in their logo or tag line. But my experience in visiting churches as a first-time guest proves otherwise. The truth is that most church members are friendly to the people they already know, but not to guests.

• Observe to see if your members greet guests with the same intensity and concern before and after the worship service as they do during a formal time of greeting in the worship service. A lack of friendliness before and after the service sends a mixed, if not hypocritical, message to new people.
• The six most important minutes of a church service, in a visitor’s eyes, are the three minutes before the service and the three minutes after the service, when church members introduce themselves, seeking genuinely to get to know the visitors (not just obtain personal information like the market research data collectors at the mall), offer to answer any questions, introduce them to others who may have a connection (perhaps they live in the same neighborhood, are from the same hometown or state, or their children attend the same school), or any number of ways to demonstrate to the visitors that they as a church member care.
• A church would be wise to discover their most gregarious and welcoming members and deploy them as unofficial greeters before and after each service, in addition to designated parking-lot greeters, door greeters, ushers, and informational booth personnel.
• Don’t make promises the church can’t keep. My wife attended a church recently that calls itself “The Friendly _______ Baptist Church,” but no one spoke to her before the service and when she sought information from the guest information booth she was treated by the attendant as a bother. Mixed messages and unfulfilled promises do great harm in a church’s effectiveness in welcoming new people.

3. Church guests are highly consumer-oriented.

“If Target doesn’t have what I need, I just head to K-Mart.” “If the Delta airfare is too high, American might have a sale.” Capitalism has taught us that if we don’t find what we want, someone else down the street or at another web site will have it. If your church building is too hard for newcomers to navigate, if they have to park in the “back 40,” if your people are unaccepting and unfriendly, another church down the street may have what they’re looking for. Or worse yet, they may decide getting into a church is not worth the effort and give up their search altogether.

• Pastors and church leaders need to look at their churches through the eyes of a first-time guest. Rick Warren says that the longer a pastor has been a pastor, the less he thinks like a non-pastor. That same thought would apply to thinking like a guest.
• The use of objective, yet trained, anonymous guests to give an honest appraisal is very important. Many retail outlets utilize the service of one or more “mystery guests” to provide helpful analysis of welcoming and responding to the consumer. Churches would be well served to utilize a similar service.

4. The church is in the hospitality business.

Though our ultimate purpose is spiritual, one of our first steps in the Kingdom business is attention to hospitality. Imagine the service that would be given to you in a first-class hotel or a five-star restaurant. Should the church offer anything less to those who have made the great effort to be our guests?

• Hospitality is almost a forgotten virtue in our society. When was the last time someone invited you to their home for a meal? But it needs to be reawakened.
• Church members can extend hospitality to guests by offering to sit with them during the church service, giving them a tour of the church facilities, inviting them to lunch after service, or connecting with them later in the week.

5.  You only have one chance to make a good first impression.

More than a truism, first impressions are lasting ones. Little hope of correcting a bad first impression is possible. Your first-time guests have some simple desires and basic needs. They decide very quickly if you can meet those criteria. The decision to return for a second visit is often made before guests reach your front door.

• Are you creating the entire experience, beginning with your parking lot?
• Are you consciously working to remove barriers that make it difficult for guests to find their way around and to feel at home with your people?
• Do newcomers have all the information they need without having to ask any embarrassing questions?
• Are your greeters and ushers on the job, attending to details and anticipating needs before they are expressed?
• Does anything about your guests’ first experience make them say, “Wow!” and want to return?

You may be the most skilled preacher and your church may have excellent small groups or the best children’s ministry in the city. Your first-time guests will never know unless they make a second or third visit. Will they come back? It all depends on the impression you’re making. Make it the right one the first time.

Click the image above and it will take you to the web site.

In the past two months, God has brought us a new and wonderful opportunity of outreach that expands our ministry well beyond our local region. We have wanted for some time to enable “live streaming” of our Sunday worship services over the Internet so that people who can’t attend can feel like they are present with us. With the connection, equipment and software in place, on May 1, we began utilizing this exceptional opportunity to impact an even greater number of people for Christ. At or before the time of our three Sunday worship services (9 a.m., 10:30 a.m. and 6:30 p.m.) you simply enter lmbc.tv into your web browser and you are able to view our services as they are happening. How cool is that?

This isn’t something new in other parts of the country, but it is new to us and it is already garnering a lot of “praise” from people who have to miss our services occasionally, are living where they can’t find a church home, or have health issues that prevent them from attending at all. Recently, one of our men who is unable to be at church due to providential matters told me that it made him feel as if he is still connected to the daily activity of our fellowship. And, we have already heard from people watching the services who are as far away as Poland, as well as from many in the states and in our own local community. I never knew just how big this ministry could be, but I’m now convinced that we can reach a significant part of the world right from the sanctuary of LMBC.

I once heard a speaker say that “someone is going to preach to more than a million people every Sunday … by way of the Internet.” At first I thought this was only fanciful thinking, but now I see how it can happen. Wouldn’t it be great if there were more than a million people tuning into our services live each Sunday? With our new Internet streaming it is no longer just a fantasy; it is now a distinct possibility! The potential for touching thousands (if not hundreds of thousands) has never been greater than it is right now. In fact, our recent statistics show that an average of 300 people already are watching our services on a regular basis.

For many years, we have broadcast our edited services on local TV (WCHS) and people have repeatedly told me they are tuning in each Sunday. But, I have never been as pleased as I am by the the positive responses we are hearing from this new ministry. I suppose that people know that the TV broadcast is an edited version of a past worship service (at least one month behind), and somehow they feel more connected to our church when they can see and hear the whole service live from beginning to end.

Just for clarification, this opportunity should never be a substitute for participating in person with a local church where you are serving and sharing God’s love on a weekly basis. However, there are many people who don’t have the privilege of attending a church like ours, who physically can’t attend church, or are in a church whose service times are different to our own worship services. These and many others would love to have our church come to them. That is what I’m being told by those presently utilizing lmbc.tv and if you’ll help me spread the word about this opportunity, I’m sure there will be many more who will respond favorably, as well.

One additional note, if you use an iPhone, iPod or iPad, you can now download a special web browser called “Skyfire” from the iTunes store that will enable you to watch the services on those devices, also. I tried this when I was away recently and it was wonderful to sit in a state far away from my home and participate in the services as they were happening.

What we need for you to do is to send invitations to your friends and family to inform them about this Internet streaming service so they can watch our services, too. It is free to watch and I believe could potentially be life-changing for many. Join me in praying that God will enable us to enlarge our viewing audience through this new medium of outreach to the far reaches of the earth. The Internet is bringing the world closer to us and us closer to the world so that we may give them the glorious message of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

Did You Know? You Can Judge a Book by Its Cover!

Christians and the Codex

It might surprise you to know that New Testament manuscripts were not written on scrolls. Most people think that the form of the modern book, known as the codex, was not invented until the Middle Ages. A codex is a book written on both sides of the page, with cut pages, bound on one side. In other words, a book! The roll or scroll was written only on one side as a rule, and it had columns with continuous pages stitched together. The codex was invented in the late first century AD. Christians may not have invented it, but they were the first ones to popularize it. For the first five centuries AD, eighty percent of all Christian books were on a codex while only twenty percent of all non-Christian books were written on a codex. For the first time in Christian history, followers of Christ were ahead of the technological curve!

The New Testament on a Roll

There are actually four New Testament manuscripts written on rolls. But all of them are on the backside or the verso side. Something else is written on the front or recto side. These papyrus rolls were reused by Christians—probably on rolls that had been discarded—who simply wanted to have a portion of the Bible at hand. In the Middle Ages, when very little was known about the ancient world, icons (a.k.a. miniatures) of the four Gospel writers (known as evangelists) were created that showed them writing on a codex. But this is historically inaccurate. We do not know exactly when Christians began using the codex-form, but it was most likely close to the beginning of the second century. Since all the Gospels are first-century documents, it is most likely that they were all written on rolls. In 2 Timothy 4.13, Paul asks Timothy to “bring the scrolls, especially the parchments.” The word for scrolls is biblia from which we derive our word Bible. It was the word for book, but was used for scrolls/rolls when Paul wrote this letter.

Some of the Implications for Understanding the New Testament

There are several implications for our understanding of the New Testament when we consider the form of the book then in use.

1. The Gospel of Mark almost surely ended at 16.8, with verses 9–20 added in the middle of the second century. Some scholars believe that Mark’s real ending was lost. But that presupposes that the early copies of Mark would have been written on a codex. Codices regularly lose material at the beginning and end of the book, just like modern-day paperback books do. But a roll would have been wound up, with the last section of the book on the inside. It would have been the most protected section of all. Thus, it is more likely that Mark intentionally ended his Gospel with an open-ended conclusion than that the real ending is lost.
2. The letter to the Hebrews, like every other New Testament document, would also have been written on a roll. An examination of ancient papyrus letters reveals two types when it comes to the addressee: they are either on the inside of the roll (as in all of Paul’s letters) or the outside. Hebrews was of the latter type. Frequently, because of exposure to the elements and handling by the courier, the addressee on the outside of papyrus rolls has faded. Sometimes the address was written on a label which was then glued to the outside of the roll. Either way, it seems likely that those to whom the letter to the Hebrews was written are unknown because the address was on the outside of the roll. The very form of this book, with the address on the outside, suggests that Paul would not have written Hebrews—as most scholars believe—since it does not conform to his modus operandi seen in all of his letters.
3. The book of Revelation speaks of a book that is sealed with seven seals (Rev 6). In order to get to each sealed section, the roll would have to be unwound. Then the wax seal would need to be cut before proceeding. If this book had been a codex, the reader could open the sections in any order, slicing open the seal he or she wanted.

Original article located at The Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts

How the Bible's Formatting Can Shape the Bible's Reading

Written by Daniel B. Wallace

Matthew 9.36–10.3 in
Beza’s Greek-Latin New Testament (1588)

Did you know that verse numbers were not added to New Testaments until 1551? The first New Testament to have them was Stephanus’ fourth edition of the Greek New Testament. His text had two Latin versions and one Greek. He put in verse numbers so that readers could keep track of how the texts lined up. The first New Testament translation (based on Stephanus’ fourth edition) to use verse numbers was the Geneva New Testament of 1557, then the Geneva Bible of 1560.
 
The verse numbers added a new wrinkle to Bibles, however. Each new verse was indented as though it started a new paragraph. This created a problem for readers because seeing the verses in their contexts was now more difficult to do. The practice of indenting each verse continued with Theodore Beza’s Greek New Testament, which the King James Version (1611) was translated from. In turn, one or two of the KJV’s descendants (most notably, the NASB) also employed the verse-indentation scheme. Not only did this format make the context harder to discern, it also gave rise to illegitimate ‘proof-texting.’ Most modern translations now indent only the paragraphs, listing the verse numbers within each paragraph. What started out as a tool to help readers compare versions became a device to keep people from understanding scripture in its context. The lesson learned from this is that the very formatting of the word of God can shape how people read the Bible.

CSNTM