Many of the hospitality practices I teach about and comment on are widely recommend in lots of different sources as well as lived experiences.

This material is aimed at committee and ministry leaders that are just getting started, whether that is from scratch, or working to improve something that is not running well.

You can get much of this experience in leading a hospitality ministry.

You can get a lot of this experience in reading books and visiting churches on your own.  I’ve learned and share specific applications of principles that I’ve picked up through my own experience and study.   To help cut down on the time, I’ve processed and organized a lot of this material to help you get started or re-started.

The claims that I make in my teaching are all based out of my personal experience, or first hand stories told by a reliable witness.  The stories I tell are my own, or those of people I have interacted with first hand.

Because much of this material is recorded live, there might always be the possibility of numbers being rounded, names changed, locations changed, and conversations not quoted verbatim but in the general flow of how I remembered them.  Even when I tell the same story multiple times, it comes out slightly different each time, though the anchor points are always the same.

The tips and practices I recommend have worked in congregations, but there is no guarantee that implementing these practices will actually accomplish anything in your context.  There are many factors beyond control when developing an organization.

I’m not promising that your visitors will come back, and by no means am I guaranteeing that yoru church will grow. There are just too many variables.

The goal of this material is to open your eyes to the unnecessary obstacles that keep visitors from returning. By going through the material, you will find various obstacles that your church has put in the way.

Churches have implemented these strategies and have seen results.  But those results are dependent on immeasurables like prayer, congregational health, leadership, volunteer mix, and other intangibles.

My attempt at putting this material together is meant to generate ideas for you to implement in your local context and none of it should be taken as a formula or recipe.  Nothing I say in this material or elsewhere should be construed as an automatic fix, as in “If you do this, you WILL get that!”

The material I present here is my own content.  I quote other sources when necessary, and try to cite sources as I go along.  Sometimes in a live setting, the source doesn’t get named, and other times, there is no one source, but multiple sources that make the same observation.