Danny ChaiI’ve raised this to appropriate parties before but no one seems to care. I can’t help but care, because I think it’s hurting our church, so I’m just going to rant about it here.
I HATE greeting time at church as it’s currently run. Hate is not too strong a word. I think it’s counter-productive, makes newcomers uncomfortable, and destroys the flow of the service. It hurts our church, and for that reason, I think I’m right to hate it. The problem is that it’s just way too long.
This is maybe that purpose thing rearing its head again, but I just can’t help it; with everything, I have to ask what the purpose is so that we can accurate assess whether things are working. It’s unsaid, but I assume a primary purpose of greeting time is to make newcomers feel welcome. Toward this purpose, greeting time as it stands fails miserably. I tend to observe more than participate in general, but when I do sound, I have an even greater opportunity to observe everything from the back, and newcomers are invariably uncomfortable during welcome time. The first minute or so is OK as people say hello (if anyone says hello). But the time drags on so long, you can see in their body language how uncomfortable they are, how the extended time when no one’s really talking to them makes them feel increasingly unwelcome.
The worst example was maybe a month or two back when this one guy, he was new and I didn’t get his name, but he literally left in the middle of welcome time and never came back. That really pained me.
To be fair, from my observation, there have been some angels in the congregation who have been super-proactive recently about engaging newcomers during the entire tortuous welcome time. But there are still too many occasions where newcomers have no one to talk to after a minute. We don’t get that many newcomers to begin with. We only have one chance to make a first impression, and if that impression is one that makes them feel unwelcome, that’s terrible.
Furthermore, because it’s so long, it essentially becomes a psuedo-fellowship time (even though upstairs afterwards is supposed to serve that purpose) and people naturally gravitate towards catching up, which makes greeting newcomers even more difficult. There’s no lonelier feeling than when everyone around you is talking to someone and you have no one to talk to. And that happens far too often with our long greeting time. The thing is, it’s all unnecessary. There’s no good reason why it needs to be that long. That’s what kills me. Unless I’m missing something, we’re making people feel uncomfortable for no good reason.
Beyond that, I have a problem with the length because it destroys the flow. In music, in speaking, really in almost anything, the most important thing is flow. In music, you strive for flow both on a micro and macro level, both within a song and throughout a set. If you have flow, people connect, there’s momentum, and it goes somewhere. Without flow, it’s much harder to connect and there’s no sense of movement.
Small group is the same way. I shared some tips a while back; pretty much all of them are related to flow. I say keep the group all together when eating because whenever you break up or come together, it’s like starting over, flow wise. Everything is about flow, and for whatever reason, I’m super sensitive to it.
The length of the greeting time kills flow. Just my opinion, but other spiritually sensitive visitors we’ve brought have said the same thing. We have this nice worship time that draws our attention heavenward. We spend some time on the weekly prayer topic, another heavenward activity. Then all of a sudden, we have this long break where we spend minutes talking to each other, pretty much just small talk. All our upward focus is lost. And it takes a long time afterwards during the sermon, to get that back again. You can see it in peoples’ body language. They still getting settled back in their seats, they’re somewhat distracted, it takes some time to get engaged again. It’s because the flow was killed.
(SN: from my experience, sound mixing matters a lot in flow also. When there’s a significant volume differential between one part to another, it kills flow also. So when the sermon volume is significantly lower than the music that precedes it, people have a harder time engaging. So I try to crank up the mic as high as possible without getting feedback at first, then very slowly turn it down if it’s too high, kind of like a turntable DJ will speed up a song past its normal speed to mesh with the song before it, then gradually slow it down. There’s a lot that goes into flow.)
I say let fellowship be fellowship; let greeting be greeting. Save fellowship time for upstairs afterwards. Greeting should be 30 seconds to 1 minute max, literally enough time to greet people around you and introduce yourself. Anything longer and it starts becoming fellowship, people start going all across the room to catch up, it makes welcoming more difficult, and it disrupts the flow.
I cannot emphasize how strongly I feel about this. Every time I watch a newcomer look visibly uncomfortable during greeting time, and unnecessarily so, a part of me dies. If we want to continue to make people feel unwelcome and destroy the flow of the service, by all means, let’s keep doing it the way we are. But I really wish we could change it.