By Ed Thompson
I have good memories of the First United Presbyterian Church of Phillipsburg, Kansas. It was, at least when I left, the smallest church in the presbytery with a solo, full-time pastor. They also have a great pianist, one of the best I have ever heard. I believe he was self-taught, but he had a great, jazzy style that was almost honky-tonk. When he starts playing, people start to smile. If you ever find yourself driving in western Kansas on U.S Route 36 some Sunday morning, it will be worth your while to turn into town and stop by the church just to hear him play. They have a good pastor, too.
I was preaching at Phillipsburg one Sunday morning, and I got there early. (That doesn’t happen all the time, but it does happen occasionally.) I was talking with the pastor, who was just coming back from a family wedding or a week of study leave, which is why he had asked me to preach for him, when I noticed a younger couple that I had never seen before.
“Did you get some new members?” I asked. With a kind of sheepish grin, he nodded his head and said, “Yeah. They joined a couple of months ago.”
Sensing there was a story there, I asked him what had led them to join the church. It turns out that one of their older members was standing by the front door of the church on a Sunday morning when she noticed one of her neighbors driving down the street to their church. (This being western Kansas, they were probably Lutherans.) She started smiling and waving enthusiastically at them because the husband had been sick and they hadn’t been out of the house and able to go to church for several weeks. She was glad to see that he was feeling better.
This younger couple had been walking down the street at the time, and they thought this woman was waving at them. So they crossed the street and starting coming up the steps of the church. Fortunately, the woman never missed a beat and let them know what was really going on. Instead, she kept smiling, introduced herself, and asked them their names, where they lived and how long they had been in Phillipsburg. (It’s a small town and basically everybody knows everybody, so any newcomers stick out.) She then invited them to come in for worship. They did. Apparently, they liked it. They kept coming back, and after about a month, they asked to join the church. They had been there ever since.
One thing that strikes me about this story is that the woman actually used the front door of the church. In my first pastorate, they never even gave me a key to the front door, and I was there for 14 and a half years. I didn’t take it personally because, as far as I know, nobody had a key to the front door. We simply undid the dead bolt on Sunday mornings or whenever something was happening at the church so that the few people who wanted to could come in that way.
Maybe it’s not a bad idea to use the front door of the church or to station someone outside the front door on Sunday mornings. I know of one congregation that’s being more intentional about keeping their front door open, at least on Sunday mornings. They had discovered that some people in their neighborhood thought the church had closed several years ago because they never saw anyone using the front door. To them, the church looked closed.
Imagine, you might have someone stand outside the front door of your church on Sunday morning. They could smile and wave at people passing by. Maybe people would get the idea that this was a friendly place, a welcoming place. That person could even ask passersby their names and where they live. They could tell them their name and where they live. They could invite them to worship. They could even ask if there’s anything the church could do for the people or if there’s some way they’d like the church to pray for them. What a concept. It might work. At least it did the one time they tried it in Phillipsburg, Kansas.