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Why Vineyard Columbus Is Committed to Creating Guest-Friendly Worship ServicesHave you ever been a visitor to a church that was extremely guest-unfriendly? No one in the church looked at you, much less talked to you. The message dealt with a subject you had absolutely no interest in and the worship music sounded as if the piano was being played with oven mitts!Guest-unfriendly churches can be compared to inviting children to a formal dinner party. At the party the children are required to wear uncomfortable suits and dresses. The food served is things that children hate - raw squid, sushi, and lots of vegetables. The adults at the table spend all of their time talking in Hungarian and when they do talk in English, they refer to people and incidents that the children know nothing about. Most of the adult conversation is about relatives in other cities and funny incidents from the family's past. The children are asked embarrassing questions about their personal lives. And when the children do speak up, they are immediately hushed and told to be quiet. Guest-unfriendly! A friend of mine visited a church in which the church sang the same opening hymn each week. When the church began singing the second verse of this opening hymn, all of the church members sat down very quickly, leaving my friend and his wife as the only couple still standing. At that point, the pastor shouted in a booming voice from the front, "I see we have guests today. Brother and sister, why don't you share a testimony with us?" Guest-unfriendly? More than a little! Guest-unfriendly churches sing hymns with utterly incomprehensible lyrics such as "I will lift my Ebenezer." Hebrew, Greek, and technical theological terms that are unexplained, as well as unsingable melody lines help make churches guest-unfriendly. Guest-unfriendliness can be found in requiring guests to stand and sing for 45 minutes. Guest-unfriendly services also have messages with lots of religious jargon. I've sat through painful church services where it was apparent that the pastor threw the message together on Saturday night or Sunday morning. The pastor simply used a series of texts and made a few unrelated comments regarding those texts. I've even sat through worship services in which pastors preached on recent dreams they had. In guest-unfriendly services, worshippers don't care about the effect of their behavior in worship upon other people. They simply concern themselves with their own private experience with God. And in guest-unfriendly services, children are an after-thought. The worst space is allocated for the kids and the kids get the broken chairs, the dingiest rooms, and the weakest, most immature teachers. Guest-friendly worship services are entirely different. Guest-friendly worship services are like a family who says, "Look, we're going to eat dinner anyway because we're a family and we eat dinner every night. But we recognize that we have some friends present who are sitting around our table tonight. Because we have friends around the table, we are not going to tell stories about our dear-departed Aunt Emma (in other words, we're not going to tell insider-only stories), and we're not going to speak in a foreign language. We are going to include our guests in all that we do and we're going to serve food that not only is a family favorite, but also is enjoyable for our guests as well. We want to make our guests as welcome as possible while continuing to have dinner because that is what we do as a family." So, in terms of the message, guest-friendly churches preach messages that have very clear life applications for both churched and unchurched people. Religious jargon is eliminated, or explained. Messages are excellently prepared and focus not on the pastor's favorite hobby horse, but on the main and plain things of scripture. Guests are regularly invited into a personal relationship with Christ. Children are well cared for. In fact, there is such an emphasis on kids that they want to come back. The church makes sure that there is adequate safety and security for children. Church budgeting doesn't simply take the lion's share of financial resource for adults; children's needs are thought about and reflected in the church budget. At a guest-friendly service, guests are welcomed and greeted, but not embarrassed. Guests understand the meaning of the worship songs and can follow the melody lines. The length of the service doesn't overwhelm guests' capacities. Guests can find their way to restrooms which, if not elegant, are at least clean. The grounds around the church building are also cleansed of litter and cigarette butts so that guests know that when they enter the church building they will likely not be mugged. Why create a guest-friendly service? Guest-friendliness is all part of the Christian virtue of hospitality. In Romans 12, the apostle Paul offers a list of injunctions concerning the way we ought to practice Christian community with each other. He says this in Romans 12:13, "Share with the Lord's people who are in need. Practice hospitality." Likewise, we read in 1 Peter 4:9 these words, "Offer hospitality to one another without grumbling." In Heb 13:1-2, the author of Hebrews says, "Keep on loving one another as brothers and sisters. Do not forget to show hospitality to strangers, for by so doing some people have shown hospitality to angels without knowing it." The Greek word for hospitality is "philoxenia." It is a Greek compound word. Philo means to love, as in Philadelphia, the city of brotherly love. Xenos means stranger. Philoxenia, then, means "the love of a stranger." Guest-friendly worship is our practice of hospitality which is literally the love of strangers who are in our midst. In a world full of hostility and fear where people are estranged from each other, estranged from their families, estranged from neighbors and friends, culture and country; in a world in which people are separated and estranged from God and, indeed, from their own selves, hospitality and guest-friendly worship services are a key for us building the kind of church God wants to create here in Central Ohio. Welcoming people in our worship services through guest-friendliness expresses God's heart of hospitality for the world. |
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