Making guests feel welcomed and wanted is an important part of building a healthy church culture. So important that you need to practice your church plant guest followup process before your grand opening.

Maybe you’ve dreamed up or read about a killer guest followup strategy. Whatever it is, there are going to be a lot of moving parts to it. The point of if all is to get guests connected to real people in your congregation and set the stage for ongoing relationship.

The common elements of today’s church plant guest followup processes are:

1. An announcement or invitation for guests to get connected
2. Some method of collecting contact information (like a paper or digital connection card)
3. Specific steps to contact guests after their visit (emails, handwritten notes, social media, etc.)
4. Intentional next steps or events for guests to be invited into

It’s All About People

There are lots of people involved in the process at Sunday gatherings:

• The person who announces the invitation from the platform
• The person(s) who collect the contact information
• The person who compiles all of the contact information
• Staff or volunteers who make contact with the guests
• Staff or key leader that leads the ministry

The players should be organized and supported by an information process (more on that in my next post).

This system isn’t going to run itself. You’ll find that there are several weak points where things usually break down. You need to have the team practice the church plant guest followup process before the big day.

How to Practice

Have everyone on your Launch Team fill out your card (or whatever) at a Launch Team meeting as if they were guests. This will help in a couple of ways:

• Your Connections Team gets to practice their process in a grace-filled environment
• It creates culture with your entire Launch Team

By the time you’re running preview services, your Connections Team should be firing on all cylinders and working the system hard. They’ll discover where the system is missing something or breaks down.

Your guests are taking a big risk in coming to your worship gathering for the first time. You can’t afford for your church plant guest followup system not to work when you start weekly gatherings.