Church Shopping - the First Congregational Visit

Today was the first day that we did not worship at Our Congregation. We went to visit a congregation about five miles west of the church. The congregation we went to visit has three worship services - a traditional at 8am, a blended at 9:15 and a contemporary service at 10:30.

I really had no idea what to expect. I chose this congregation to visit because a few people mentioned that they were considering visiting it on their own. Members of my congregation have friends that attend this congregation or they just simply know about the congregation because it's pretty close to our congregation.

I got to the church at 7:45 and I did expect some people to come to the traditional service. This is the style of our worship and I thought that people would want to attend a similar service, but I also thought that the time would keep some people home. (Our worship service is 10am). Six of my parishioners came for the 8am traditional service. And, two of the people that came were not long time parishioners, in fact they are not even full members. These two people have worshiped at Our Congregation for about a year and started attending church again after a long break. I was very happy to see these parishioners participate in the church hunt. It give me hope that the typical outcome of most members of a closing congregation do not find new church homes will not be the norm for Our Congregation.

The service itself was very nice. The worship space was beautiful and the people were very nice and welcoming. This congregation is going off lectionary (the church's reading schedule for the texts) and instead reading through the entire bible in a year during the worship services. It's a course called The Story, the bible is told in story form.I wasn't sure how people from my congregation would react to this (or if they would even notice). There was a point in the service where a screen came down to show a video associated with The Story readings for the day and then there were photos posted during the pastor's sermon. This also made me wonder how my people would react. Other than these two differences, the service was very typical and a very traditional Lutheran service.

After the service was over I didn't really know what to expect. I met the woman to volunteered to take my parishioners on a tour before the service so as we gathered in the Narthex I tried to have everyone meet her and have them start talking. I'm not sure how smooth this worked out, but I trust it went well. There was only a 10 minute break between the end of the traditional service and the beginning of the blended service which meant that I could not go on the tour because people from my congregation were starting to show up for the next worship service.

Before I knew it there were 13 people that came from Our Congregation to attend the blended worship service. It was great! I never expected that 19 people would participate in the first week of congregation visits. This next service was pretty full and there were so many kids. I know that some of my parishioners were happy to see the kids. This service had more traditional aspects than contemporary aspects - which I thought was just about perfect for many of my parishioners (and I know that a 9:15 worship start time would be more doable than 8am for many of them as well!). After the service was over the worship host was a little more busy this time because there were so many other people attending this worship service. People wanted to individually welcome the visitors and have conversations with my people. It was a great reception and I don't think the tour actually happened after this service. I followed along because there was 20 minutes between this service and the contemporary service, and I really didn't expect anyone to come to the contemporary. We went down to the fellowship hour (in an elevator! I know this was a huge thing to a few of my parishioners) and my people were just taken into the fold. It was wonderful.

I ended up being a few minutes late to the contemporary service - which I thought was no big deal. But, to my surprise there was one person that came to visit the contemporary service. She is the congregations youngest member (just a hair younger than me!). She told me that she really likes contemporary services and figured she would try this one out. She is also a person that joined after I was installed as pastor. She started attending church again after a long break away and I am again so happy to see that she is not taking the closing of Our Congregation as a reason to stop church again but is instead going along with finding a new church home.

The worship host did not stick around to give a tour after the contemporary service, but it was okay. Instead we stuck around a talked to a few of the people for Our Congregation that were just coming out of the fellowship hour and kind of debriefed the visit (in a very informal way).

All in all, it was a wonderful congregational visit. 20 people from my congregation went on the visit - which is more than I could ever have hoped for. And, I heard from a  few people that they are very glad that we are doing this as a congregation.That it is very helpful for them to go to a new church with other people that they know. That they couldn't imagine walking into this church alone after June 10th. It made me very glad to hear this confirmation. That sentiment was also echoed from a lot of the members of the congregation that we visited - that they thought the visits were a great idea and that it is helping some of them in the process of knowing that a neighboring congregation is closing. (I never even thought about that side of things).

I have to admit that I wasn't sure how these visits were going to work out. I know it's a little unorthodox. I haven't heard of other congregations going through a closing process doing something like this so I had nothing to base the concept off of. All I have to say is that if the rest of the visits are anything like this visit I will be suggesting this as a model for other congregations going through a closing process. Today was truly a blessing.