A word that means everything means nothing.
I’ve been doing this work for years now. I have never once had a church describe itself to me without using the word welcoming. Not one.
That should tell you something. If every church is welcoming, the word has stopped doing any work. It’s not describing anything anymore. It’s just noise that sounds like description.
Here’s the thing that makes it worse. You don’t get to control what welcoming means to the person reading it. In my own city, the most inclusive church in town and the least inclusive church in town both use the word on their signs and their websites. Same word. Opposite realities. The visitor has no way to tell which one they’re walking into.
I’m a massive introvert who avoids new social situations on principle. When I read that a church is welcoming, my brain doesn’t hear warmth. It hears warning. It tells me I’m about to get pulled into more interaction than I want on a Sunday morning I’m already nervous about.
This isn’t really a values problem. Your church might genuinely be warm and open and easy to walk into. You may actually be welcoming.
This is a communication problem. Welcoming used to point at something specific and now it points at nothing, which means it’s doing the opposite of its job.
If you want people to feel something specific when they read about your church, you have to describe the thing itself. Who are you as a church? What does it actually feel like to walk in? What happens in the first five minutes? What do people notice? Say that instead.
Go disrupt something,
Christen
