The joy of church hopping

Disclaimer: I am opposed to church hopping.

Due to various circumstances in my life, I have visited at least 17 different churches in the past year. In each case I came as a visitor, and I checked things out. The following are some of my impressions:

• Appearance matters – and it starts outside. Taking care of your grounds communicates excellence. In some places I got good vibes in the parking lot.
•  Inside appearance matters more. Churches can be like houses – you can get so used to living in them that you fail to realize that the bathtub is baby blue and the stove is avocado. Lobbies that look like funeral home parlors are outdated.
• It’s nice when people come early. That seems to happen more at the churches with coffee shop type lobbies (ah, updates!). An early crowd gives the sense that people are excited to be there.
• Every church has greeters – but not all greeters are the same. Most greeters were content to hand me a bulletin, but didn’t say much, if anything. Sometimes I felt like I was walking into Walmart.
• Bulletins. Wow. It’s just two sides of an 8 ½ x 11 sheet of paper, but it’s enough space to do some seriously bad things. This is what people take home with them – why not make them look nice? Some I never even attempted to read. Call it the intimidation factor. I have more thoughts on this, but I’ll save them for another post.
• Are you ready for this one? In zero, nada, none, zilcho of the churches I attended as strictly a visitor did I have any person (besides a staff member or someone I already knew) make an attempt to be friendly beyond the perfunctory hello. It must be me. Maybe I look pastoral and intimidate the average church member?
• I like shorter services. Most services seemed to fall into the little over an hour category. The ones that went any longer seemed very long – and usually they seemed very long because the speaker talked for a very long time. And the longer he talked, the less I seemed to remember. And I’m not even ADD.
• What about the Bible? I dutifully carried mine into every service. Call it habit. Here is what I found. In every single church service the Bible was mentioned and verses were read. That’s a good thing. However, in many cases the Bible was referenced rather than explained, and sometimes it seemed to be used more as a support than the source.
• The services that stuck out to me had three things going for them.
  1) Expression of vision – when I left I felt like I knew what that church was about
  2) Flow – the service seemed to be intentionally crafted from start to finish so there were no gaps or announcements of what was to come next
  3) Relevance – I liked it when at the beginning of the message (or even better, at the beginning of the service) I was told what the main point was, what need was to be addressed, what question was to be answered.
• Some churches feel happy. People respond to humor, the music is appreciated (without the judgmental frowns of some), the crowd sticks around after the service. Those churches made me wish that someone would talk to me.
• Every church does things differently. That’s ok. In fact, I think it is good. I actually have enjoyed the variety.

In just about every church I found something I liked. And next Sunday? I’ll be at church – because I love church. Maybe I’ll be at your church. So if you see someone you don’t recognize, try to be friendly. It just might be me.