Our theme for the year is Invited, based on Romans 15:7: “So reach out and welcome one another to God’s glory. Jesus did it; now you do it!”
Each of us has an important role to play in creating a spirit of hospitality here at First Baptist: inviting people to church, greeting people warmly, getting to know newcomers, and helping them find a place to belong within our church family.
A few months ago, I met someone out and about in Greenville who told me she had visited First Baptist but stopped coming because her family did not feel welcomed. I asked her to share more about her experience, and it gave me a lot to think about. I will be honest; it wasn’t easy to hear. But if we want to grow in the kind of hospitality Jesus modeled, we must be willing to listen and learn from her experience. So, brace yourself.
—Carol McEntyre
“When we decided to visit First Baptist Greenville, we were a little nervous because it was the first time in a LONG time that we were going to show up at a church where we didn’t know anybody at all. When we arrived, we dropped off our daughter in the nursery and then made our way to the sanctuary.
During the three or four Sundays we visited, nobody in the congregation approached our family to welcome us or introduce themselves. I remember one female minister (I think she was involved in the music ministry?) who stopped at our pew once before a service and said she was glad to have us there, but beyond this brief greeting, we felt pretty invisible. We did shake the hands of some of the ministers when we left the service each week, since they were out in the foyer greeting those who left, but even they didn’t acknowledge that we were new or ask questions about what brought us to First Baptist. I’m not sure if they were trying to give us space to engage on our own timetable?
After a few weeks, we stopped attending, in part because the worship style was a bit more “high church” than we were accustomed to. We would have been happy to adjust to an unfamiliar worship style if we had felt warmly welcomed—after all, the worship style at the church we ended up joining wasn’t exactly our preference, but the compensating warmth of the congregation brought us back week after week.”