mgpcpastor's blog

Thom Rainer featured a post recently about ‘Guest blindness’, the inability to perceive our churches the way that newcomers see it.
A local church gets used to its culture and facilities and can overlook a lack of hospitality or incremental decline.
Over time a pastor who worked away on these issues develops fatigue about having to encourage constant maintenance or simply starts to overlook the issue.

Rainer’s post offers five points:

1. Gradual slippage is hard to detect. The pastors see the church almost every day. Daily deterioration of the facilities and slight slippage in ministries are almost impossible to detect. Over time, though, the slippage can become a major deficiency.
2. Relationships can blind them to reality. The pastor has many good relationships in the church. The people he knows are friendly to each other and to him. He does not perceive that they are not so friendly to strangers.
3. The pastor has received positive feedback from some guests. But the pastor rarely hears from those who have had a bad experience.
4. The pastor does not intentionally ask for feedback from all guests. There is no system in place that attempts to hear from everyone who visits.
5. The feedback from members is positive. Pastors and members often feel positive about the friendliness of members to one another. The pastor then assumes the members’ attitude and friendliness to each other is the same for guests.

Read the rest of the post to see Rainer’s suggested approaches to overcoming ‘guest blindness’.