HCI Coaching Guides

Love Environment Strategy Guide

Healthy Church Initiative

Missionary Church, Inc

Use this strategy guide to help you guide the church in answering the four questions that will help them have a strong loving environment.

Loving those inside the church.

  1. If someone in your church has a need, how do you find out about it and show love and concern?

Talk about what the church is already doing in this area and how effective it is.

If some areas are not that effective, talk about what could be done to make it more effective.

Talk about what else the church could be doing to help discover and meet the needs of those in the church. If the church needs an idea, a good approach is to appoint “Care Coordinators” in each group in the church. These care coordinators listen for needs and then report to the pastor or overall Care Coordinator so steps can be taken to care for the needs. You can share your own ideas here of what you have seen working in your church as well as other churches.

  1. How does your church grow closer together?

Look at each of the church gatherings and talk about how they could be strengthened to build relationships. Discuss if there are any other gatherings we can create to get people together so they can build friendships.

Study the “one another” scriptures. I usually break the task force into 4 groups (it may be only one in a group) and have them look up five scriptures (group 1 does 1-5; group 2 does 6-10; group 3 does 11-15; group 4 does 16-20). For each scripture they are to write down the “one another” listed. Some passages have more than one. Give them a few minutes to complete this. Then have a spokesperson from each group read their answers. The other groups can jot these answers down.

Build awareness in the church. If people are going to live the “one another’s” out, they first have to know them (the mind change). Brainstorm ways that the leaders and people in the church can learn these one another statements (sermon series, the board doing the same Bible study, classes and small groups doing the Bible study, listed in the bulletin, shown on the screen during pre-service announcements, etc.). The key is to make the church aware that scripture tells us how we should be treating each other. After brainstorming several ideas, pick one or two to get started by the next meeting.

Talk about how to encourage people to live these out. Start with the task force. Discuss some ways that the task force can encourage each other to not only “know” the one another statements but to also “live out” these statements. Pick one or two ideas to start before the next meeting.

Loving those outside the church.

  1. If someone visits your church, how do you show love and concern?

Discuss what the church is currently doing in this area. Discuss how effective this is. Discuss what could be done to make what they are doing more effective.

What else does the church need to do to show love to visitors? Here we are talking about greeter systems, hospitality systems, phone calls, letters, getting involved in small groups, assimilation systems, etc. You can share what your church is doing in this area and what other churches are doing. Brainstorm ideas and pick one to get started by the next meeting. If the church needs additional ideas, one project could be for the task force to visit another church that is successful in visitor attention and assimilation and talk with that churches leaders how they do it. Here are some of the areas you should look at:

Guest follow-up (phone calls and letters, get-acquainted packet of church ministries)

Three lines of defense: 1) greeters, normally at the front door and in the parking lot; 2) hospitality—a staffed welcome center along with hosts to answer questions and escort guests to children’s rooms, food areas, worship center, etc; and 3) intentional friendliness—zone greeters in the worship center who are responsible for an area of chairs or pews and making sure leaders are on the lookout for guests to make a point of talking with them.

Newcomer orientation: meeting with the pastor to learn about the church. You can also consider here a digital pictorial directory of all church families. Take digital pictures of everyone and print using a program like Microsoft Publisher. This is easily updated.

Shepherding System: assigning all church families to leaders in the church to be sure that all families are cared for and can be contacted if on the verge of dropping out.

System for getting newcomers connected into small groups.

Good first impressions by visitors are critical if they are going to come back to our church. A good way to get some ideas in this area is the “First Impressions” guide. I usually have this completed in two ways: each task force member can complete their own guide then these can be shared at a subsequent task force meeting. I also ask the pastor to get another pastor friend to complete the guide except for the worship experience part (they usually can’t be there for that!). This can also be shared at a subsequent meeting. Another option is to have the church board complete the guide. When all the guides are back in someone should tabulate all the results and have this ready for a discussion by the task force. The task force can look over the results and work on those areas that need improvement. The second page of the First Impressions guide has ideas to consider.

  1. How does the community even know you exist and care for them?

The key here is to get people out in the community doing “loving acts of kindness.” There are two reasons: the community begins to experience the love of the church and the church creates an experience for its own people to be touched by God and change their own hearts. There are two ways to get this started:

Read Matthew 25:34-40. Brainstorm ideas what the church could do to touch people in some of these “compassion” type ministries. Pick one idea to start by the next meeting.

Hand out the book to each task force member101 Ways to Reach Out to Your Community by Steve Sjorgen. The task force should go over this book as homework and report back to the group the projects that caught their attention. Then the group can pick one project to work on. Plan this project as a group: what will be done, who will do it, how it will be done, when, etc. It would be good for the first project to be done by the task force since they are leaders in the church and therefore need to be models of what they are asking the church to do. When the first project is completed they can help the other groups in the church get started.

The goal here is to get Sunday school classes and small groups to do at least one community love project each quarter. These can either be compassion type ministries or ideas from the book. As the church gets some experience in this area, the projects should gradually move more towards the compassion ministries. While the love outreach projects are fun and usually easier to implement, it is the compassion ministries that really demonstrate that we love people in our communities and want to touch them with God’s love.