Tuesday, February 19, 2008

The Stewardship of First Time Guests


I am making my way through Nelson Searcy and Jennifer Dykes Henson's Fusion: Turning First-Time Guests into Fully Engages Members of Your Church, and am appreciating their emphais that how we respond to and follow up with first time guests is an issue of stewardship. While I have always placed a high value on first time guest follow up I have not looked at as a stewardship issue.

Yet, as these authors point out, every guest that comes through your doors on Sunday is a gift from God. For some reason God has moved in that person's heart to bring them to your church that Sunday and that is a gift. What will you do with the gift that God has given you? Like all of God's other gifts, we are to use the gifts of God in an appropriate way and to his glory. Thus, the practical and non-sexy ideas and work of assimilation are grounded in a theology of stewardship.

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