What’s Your Vibe? Reengineering Your First Impressions for New Visitors

Every church—or any organization for that matter—has a vibe. It can be good, bad, indifferent, or whatever. But very few take stock of what it is…and even fewer are intentional about shaping it. If you’ve ever wondered why new people visit your church but rarely stick, it’s more than likely the vibe you're giving off. In this episode, our panel will take a hard look at how to assess the atmosphere of your church as well as offer practical ideas for changing your “first impressions”. Our panel this week includes regulars Paul Baldwin and Dave Workman along with newcomer Sarah Lau. Sarah is a Next Steps Director at Next Level Church, a large multi-campus church in the Fort Myers/Coral Gable area of Florida that specializes in creating high energy, welcoming environments for guests. 

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Transcript

I want you to imagine your favorite restaurant, the place you would choose for lunch tomorrow. Probably as soon as you go in there you know exactly what you want and just how you want it made. Maybe you can picture how it would feel to order and how the food would taste. You keep going back there because it's familiar and comfortable. Maybe they recognize you when you go in and you just like it. Now think back to the first time you went to that place. Maybe you weren't so sure what to order. Maybe unsure how the food would taste or whether you wanted to go there at all. That first time none of the servers recognized you and you probably didn't know any of them. Maybe it was okay to try a new place but you didn't really know what to expect or how you would like it or if you ever wanted to go back.

Welcome to the Elemental Leaders Podcast. Designed to help you grow more effective in your leadership. Visit us at ElementalGroup.org for more resources and free downloads.

Welcome to the Elemental Leaders Podcast. My name is Paul. I'm one of the hosts and I'm joined with Dave Workman. Dave, welcome. It's great to be here, man. And we have a special treat. We have a guest co-host, Sarah Lau. She is the next steps director at Next Level Church, a fantastic church down in Fort Mayer doing incredible things in their community. What's up, Sarah?

Hi. I'm really excited to be here with you guys. Thank you for inviting me.

Of course. We're stoked that you're here. The topic today is going to be super practical and super tactical. We gave it the title, "What Vibe Do You Give Off?" So if you're a leader, you're trying to create atmospheres, environments, whether it's an organization that you lead in the nonprofit world, even in the business world, but certainly in the church. We know most of our audience has a leadership role in the church. And so we want to talk about the vibe that you give off. Did you know that it only takes seven seconds for people to form a first impression? I want to talk a little bit about how long does it take for people to develop an impression of your church or the organization that you lead. And so Dave, I got this language actually from you. So maybe can you give us an overview?

I liked using that term "vibe" back in the day. It was a term that jazz musicians came up with a gazillion years ago about music. And the whole thing was that you could have musicians who just had the best equipment and played all the right notes, just they looked cool the whole bit, but not have a vibe. Something just didn't feel right. And so it was some of those intangible things that we were trying to figure out. For instance, in our church services, we got really intentional about wanting to design a vibe or a feel or the atmosphere to feel like this is a safe place to hear the dangerous message of Jesus. And so we just want to lower all the religious and subculture barriers that got in the way of people hearing the essential gospel message that God is crazy and love with you. But to really experience that love, you'll have to surrender and die. So it's a dangerous message. You can go into anybody's house, anybody's home, and you can pick up the vibe of the family in just a few minutes. You can tell right away if this is a family that is very structured, is very disciplined, is this or that, or this is a family that is loose and they just like to have fun or whatever. You can pick it up and it's that atmospheric element that we were trying to identify and then figure out what is our vibe.

Sarah, you are the next steps director at Next Level Church, Jennifer Fort Myers. This is what you do from day to day. You always have a mind for this. So can you talk a little bit about what this looks like or what this means or maybe how it's done in your context?

Sure. I think something that's so crucial to how we engage with people is that it's not just about how you feel about them but what you do to communicate how you feel about them. So most people who love Jesus and work in churches or in any environment or business, you're going to want your client or the people coming in to know that you care for them or that you're there for them, those types of things that most churches have. But if you're not doing anything to show that you care, they can't know. And so that intentionality piece is so important when it comes to speaking to people even, teaching your teams and your people how to engage, what to say, what questions to ask when they're engaging in a conversation, intentionally asking the right questions. And this is just kind of basic but never asking someone, "Is this your first time here?" Because then the thoughts start running through their mind of, "How did they know it was my first time here?" Or they start feeling uncomfortable or maybe they have anxiety. I think that those pieces are so important and it even starts way before they even arrive on your property. I would even add to that social media presence as well. Just the day and age in our culture, even people that I'm engaging with, they tend to like look you up on something, whether that's Facebook or LinkedIn or some type of social media presence before they engage with you. And on the flip side, we do it too. If someone's reaching out that you don't know, we're trying to look them up, do I know that person? Have I seen their face before? So just like that engagement starts there and something that I think has been around forever but I think we discredit it now because of how technologically advanced we are is even the phone call. How crucial that first impression is over the phone before they ever step foot on your property. I met a woman recently who she was looking for a home church in our community. She called another local church and she really was trying to figure out what she believes because she just doesn't know, she doesn't follow Jesus yet. So she called this other church and just said, "Could you explain a little bit to me about what you believe?" And she told me that the person on the other end kind of did like a deep breath and said, "I'm not here to debate the Bible with you, ma'am." He interpreted her question as controversial and she started weeping over the phone and was like, "I'm just trying to figure out who Jesus is." And so luckily she didn't give up in the process of searching. She reached out to someone who said, "You just haven't found the right church yet." And when I met her and she told me this story, like my heart was so broken for her because I'm like, "Wow, like that could have been the end of the story." So we have an opportunity to engage with people well before they even arrive on our property to share the love of Jesus and just be intentional and slow down with them. So even those opportunities in a phone call or some websites have like a text thread, communication or an email, just that those things are still valuable right now just as much as they were 10, 20 years ago in ministry or in in the marketplace.

So if I were to walk into your church, what would I experience? What would a typical Sunday morning be like? I just truly believe that it starts in the parking lot. There's everything from directional signs out even in the parking lot, like the flag banners and that type of thing to greeting in the parking lot, people being present and ready to engage even outside before you step into the foyer or the worship experience. So there's people waiting to engage with you and that they're expecting that you're gonna be there. I think that intentionality is so important for people to, when they walk up to feel like, "Wow, like they planned for me to come." It's not like they're caught off guard or surprised by that and really just that slowed down so much of our world is so fast-paced and we have the opportunity on the weekends to engage with people in a slowed down way that shows them like we value them to the point that like you matter so I'm gonna take the time to like talk to you and training your people that it's okay that you're spending time with this other person and not with them. And so then as they walk into the building, hopefully they're gonna be greeted, they're gonna have coffee, you know, free coffee. We actually don't have like the full service paid coffee bar but we still do the free coffee served personally though. Like it's there's a person there to interact with, not just a coffee station for you to self-serve but that there's a person because each task is an opportunity to engage. So seeing that as the tool for engagement, not just the opportunity to say like, "Here's coffee because we should have coffee." That everybody's seeing the purpose behind each detail of that experience and then by the time they get to their seat there's another person helping them find a seat and that they're there and ready and expect it for experiencing what Jesus has for them that day. 

Sarah, Dave talked about you know the vibe and just being intentional about the atmosphere and the culture and just kind of having eyes to see all the different aspects that would remove barriers for people that might be considering showing up. How intentional or proactive are you as a team to think through some of these things? We remind our teams every single weekend through what we call huddles. So it's a gathering with just our specific team to kind of give a download and remind them of the culture, the vision, the mission. Like we focus on one of those things so we don't overwhelm and then we kind of double click on whatever that looks like and give an action step that's applicable to that Sunday. So for example with intentionality we use this terminology, we call it the 531 and so it's five high fives or handshakes or whatever whatever your vibe is that you can give off to someone else whatever that looks like for you and then three names learning three people's names and then a story. And so the hope would be we're that intentional we're trying to put that on someone's radar as they show up to serve so that they're not just thinking of about whatever the task is or getting that person signed up for a next step but they're so focused on getting to know you and valuing who you are and that you matter. And so as a leader like on the flip side of that when I'm leading a huddle I'm starting out by reminding them that they matter so I'm modeling that for them. And then I'm giving them a practical next step of how to execute that day in real time. And then on our best days we'll regroup to share what those wins are. We define a win as a name and a story. So sharing somebody's name and what was the story that you heard about their life. Oh interesting okay. And like about that woman I wouldn't have gotten to know her story if I didn't slow down with her. So I met her on a weekend then invited her out to coffee and just got to know her personally. And I think that again those are some things that may sound basic but the bigger a church grows the more you can forget about those things that got you to where you are and it's a balance of both and, like yes you have to change the strategy and the location pastor the lead pastor can't be the one going to coffee with every new person but we have a team for that and so it's not losing those things that were valuable in the beginning.

What I loved about what Sarah was just talking about was the intentionality of her team. Yeah because vibe is really kind of the outward expression of your culture and your culture is really hard to identify. It's how we talk about how fish thinks about water. It just doesn't. It's just not part it's there it is. The level of self-awareness that organizations and churches have is typically woefully under resourced or even thought about. And so the fact that Sarah's church is thinking so intentionally about how we engage people and what the atmosphere is like when a new person walks in that is not often the case in churches. 

So Dave let me ask you about your church your context because you were pastoring in in the church that you were serving in for 30 years and I know that church to be quite hospitable and quite attentive to the vibe in the atmosphere. Can you briefly walk us through how that evolved? Was that day one or was that something that just happened organically and eventually became more intentional? Well it became more intentional because you know in a church plant you're still forming who you are. You're trying to you know you're just modeling what your parent church did while you're still trying to figure out. You hadn't individuated like a like a teenager does or like even a toddler does. We were very much in the early 1980s we were a high Vineyard church which meant that worship could go on for 40 minutes or so. Okay. And then the pastor would talk for oh it could be 45 50 minutes and then we would do ministry time and that would go on forever and I remember my wife talked her sister into coming to church with her and after she left her sister said why are you guys so weird? We weren't even thinking in those days about what it was like for a total outsider and someone who's maybe far away from God to come and just sit there and observe.

So one of her first impressions was it's you guys are weird. Yeah. 

Yeah. And we were weird. We were not thinking along the lines of people who were far away from God. As our mission and vision became more clear oh this is really what we're about. God has put us in this city specifically to be reaching people who are far away. At one point I remember doing a survey in our church where 40% of the people attending had never been to a church before or went twice a year. When your mission gets laser focused then you begin to talk about or think about the vehicles that carry that message and what that's like. It was a shift for us. It was a transitional shift as we began to think about things as simple as this. If in the current culture the currency is time, no one I know has extra time. Everyone is so scheduled out and so busy. And so if the current culture currency is time then the question becomes how much should lost people pay to hear the message of Jesus?

Oh that's an Instagrammable moment. That's good.

Well it just makes you think about how you spend your time if your mission is that and what's their span of attention. All of the things that you begin to think about because in the end it's the mission that is paramount. How you accomplish that becomes critical. What I loved about Sarah's comments were how smart and sharp and intentional they were about engaging people who may be experiencing a community for the first time. 

Let's speak to churches that don't have big staffs because that's most churches and they're trying to figure out are we hospitable? What vibe do we have? How could you coach them? Well obviously you want your mission clarified first. That's the thing that's going to drive everything. I think you can assess or measure those vibe intangibles. I think there are five things that we would look at. We would look at the participation level within the service. So were people actively engaged? Were they listening or are they responding in some ways during worship? Is there any attempt by the people up front to draw people in? Humor was a big deal for us. When a group of people laugh it's like oh we have something in common. You laugh at that too. Engagement. Yeah so engagement. So participation was a big deal.

A second thing that we would look at would be energy. What's the sense of momentum? Is the service going somewhere? For us and in our tribe it was are the worship songs directed to God? There was an energy level there for people wanting to connect. Do the people on the platform do they appear warm and authentically energetic and informal or do they look like they're bored or cheesy or whatever? Are the messages inspirational? Are they challenging in a way? So what's the energy level? And then we would look at inclusiveness. Is the language in the service too inside? Is it filled with buzzwords or Christianese that the average person wouldn't have any clue of if they weren't familiar with Christianity or religion at any level? Are the words to the songs? Are they accessible? Are they are they understandable? Is the room lighting appropriate? I mean think about your own home. You know I had a friend who ran a restaurant. He said you always keep the lights low in the restaurant and that gives a sense of warmth and plus it makes the place look cleaner. So is the music culturally inclusive for whatever culture you're trying to reach and so forth? How does your hospitality team come off? Are they inclusive or do they seem like they're just talking to each other and there's a little click going on?

The fourth thing is just quality. Do you care enough about your guests to do a good job, the best job that you can? Do the sermons, do the messages seem off the cuff and not really well thought out or relevant? Do the graphics look like you know somebody's third grader did it? All that kind of stuff. You just want to think about that. And then the last thing for us, and this might be a little unique to our tribe, was just flow. I think it's important for any church. Does the message for instance seem like it has continuity from connecting from one point to the next to whatever or the rabbit trails or does it feel too long? Does it feel redundant? My personal feeling is that great communicators can do 35 and 45 minute talks but most of us can't and most of us could cut the fluff and have way better messages if we cut them down to 25 minutes in my opinion. The reality is that great communicators are few and far between. Did people leave wanting more? Was there a sense that the service was just paced well if there are announcements to be made? How does that work and so forth? Did the worship leader talk between songs and so forth? Please stop that. Just so anyway, it's all this kind of you're looking at flow. How did things flow?

I remember one woman telling me that she had survived a tornado in Cincinnati. Her house was missed and several houses on her street were leveled. She begins to think about, "Wow, what if something would have happened to me? Where would I be?" And so she started thinking about God and eternity. And what she did, she would drive to churches and sit in the parking lot after the church service was over, not go in but just wait and see what people looked like when they left. Oh, interesting. You know, if they were smiling, they seemed like, "Yeah, that was challenging. That was good." If they came out walking looking like they'd been to a funeral or board, she said, "No, I don't need that in my life." 

Yeah, that's interesting. It's funny. I'm looking over those words. You know, are people participating? Is there energy? Is there inclusiveness? Is there quality? Is there flow? My wife and I hosted Thanksgiving dinner and we got the whole mess family coming over and we were thinking through, not so intentionally, but as we were thinking through hosting, these words all resonate with what we were thinking because they're coming into our house. And so we wanted to make sure things were clean and tasty and friendly and energizing and all of these different things. So it's interesting that you brought up that illustration earlier on. What I'm wondering here is, when you're thinking about inclusion and so forth, how you make that work with churches that are painting in a broad brushstroke, that gets more and more difficult. But I was wondering, Sarah, like with you, you're a much younger person, certainly much, much younger than I am. So when you think about your generation, what do you think are important to them in terms of feeling included or like, man, the vibe of this place is great?

Yeah, I think something that is so powerful is just the invitation culture, not just before they get there, but when they're there. So I think for a young adult, let's say, they just want to be invited back as simple as that. They may not even know, if they're coming in and they haven't had any church background or maybe they've been away from the church or they only ever went with their parents and now we have a big university by us, so we get college students here all the time. They just want to know that someone acknowledged them and that they're being invited back into something. So having a healthy groups culture, having things that make bigger churches feel small, and even if your church is smaller, like that relationship is what I really think is what's connecting to people, that your interactions with them are not just transactional, but they're actually geared towards connectivity, that there's a connection being made with them. And then a second step of that is helping them meet a need that matters to them. Because I think when you work in ministry, you're, I mean, it's a good thing, like we're wired for discipleship. So we're thinking of what's the spiritual next step, but sometimes we forget like what's a relational next step that this person needs or what is a practical next step? Like if they just move to the area and they're a family with children and they don't know where to go to school or doctors, offices or dentists, like instead of all my follow up with that person or connectivity being just focused on the church, it's actually focused on them. What's the thing that they need that I could, what's the problem that they're walking in with that I could actually help solve for them? And those discipleship pieces will happen naturally out of that. So I think to answer your question, like it's all of that. I think it's relational is really what keeps people coming back and it's inviting them. Even Jesus, he was an inviter. He invited people into what he was doing. So it's figuring out like, how do I invite them into the world of our church? How do I invite them into community and help point them to a next step? And even practically thinking every conversation I have, my mind is going, what's the next step for this person? Like how can I invite them into deeper relationship?

Probably a good way to remember this. People just want to know that they belong. I mean, there's another great church down in Miami. I'll give them the props. Voo Church, they do a really neat thing at the end of their service. They're just very intentional about saying it. They're saying, hey, you don't have to agree with us to be with us. And some of the things that you heard today might not make sense and you may not be there yet. But we just want to encourage you and the whole auditorium says, just keep coming back. And that phrase orbits around this idea that you belong here. There's a place for you here, there's safety for you here. And we're going to work tirelessly to make sure that that's the case.

Yeah, I love that, Sarah, that you said that it's it can't just be transactional. And so for a smaller church and maybe a church that's aging is it's so dangerous when some college kid walks in that, oh, we need them for our church. And it becomes really transactional. Instead of the way you are approaching was, I wonder what their needs are. I wonder what a next step for them just in terms of a sense of belonging, what would that look like instead of we need this person to change the makeup of our church. Yeah, we recently did an interview with Jay Pathak, who's the National Director of Vineyard USA. So, you know, a big messy movement of churches. But he brought up the thing about how he never felt like he fit in anywhere. His father was Indian, and his mother was Caucasian with English roots. And so he just kind of this blend where he said, I never felt like I fit in in any group. And I asked him, I said, did that make you adaptive? He said, absolutely. And what it causes him to do is when he steps into any context, he said, I assume I don't know anything. So I asked lots of questions and curiosity has been his friend. To me, that sounds like what you were doing and saying, you know, when someone knew is that you're curious about them. And you want to know about them rather than this transactional thing of making our church look younger or whatever.

I think that is a danger the longer that you're in ministry because every person has, you know, cares about to some degree, like they have teams to build, they have things to accomplish, they have goals to meet and not that any of those things are bad or wrong. Like we need them to keep keep moving forward. But you don't want that person to be the means to an end of your goal. Because people pick up on that so quickly. And so if they feel like you truly care about them, it changes the whole dynamic. And like I said, like Jesus just did that so well with people as he slowed down, even in their sin, like he could address sin in a loving way and bring freedom to their sin through forgiveness. But it changed their life. And then he would, you know, encourage them with the next step of like, well go and sit no more or come and follow me. Like he gave them those intentional steps. And I think that we can forget so much in that world that we're just thinking of like, let me solve my problems and not about how to solve theirs.

That's good. Well, since you brought him up, let's talk about Jesus for a second. So Luke 14. This is the big party that Jesus is inviting people to. Can you can you talk through that just briefly? This is Jesus inviting all the people to a party that's there. Well, it's not him, but in the parable, the story. And the story is that people make up excuses for not coming. Is that what we're talking about here? Yeah, you did some writing on that. And I really appreciated it. Well, gee, I don't thank you, but I don't remember the writing. 

Well, you didn't actually write Luke 14. I want to be clear.

The idea is that the master, the party giver wants his house full. He wants to have a party. So then go out and get anyone you can to come. Get the social outcasts, get the ones on the outside, whoever you can get them to come because I want my house full. I want a party. The danger in us religious folks or us who've been around for a long time. It seems to me that Christians can circle the wagons faster than anybody. And I think it's part of our just our fallen nature and our desire to look out for number one and surround ourselves with comfortability. To step outside of that is really hard for any of us to do. And I think it's the job of leaders. I'm talking about leaders in the church to always be thinking about those who haven't yet connected, who are outside of the party. And I think if that forms your reason for everything as a follower of Jesus, then all the other pieces kind of fall into place and you can figure those things out and begin to put some intentionality in your methodologies and so forth.

So good. And thanks for letting me put you on this spot there. And it's a challenge, this great challenge of leaders in the church because we're trying to minister to people who have been walking with the Lord for 30, 40 years. At the same time, we're trying to minister to people who come through the doors that couldn't name a book of the Bible. And so it's not without its challenges, but nevertheless, it's a task that we have to pay attention to to be sure. So I just want to encourage our listeners, go back and listen to this episode again, do it with your pen and just take notes because there's some really good content that you can apply to your context.

Can I just bump in here for a second? Do it. It just seems to me that great leaders like Sarah, people who are leaders, they have to think about the atmosphere and the vibe in an intentional way. They just think about that all the time. And when your mission becomes focused, like we've talked about, and if it's focused like the parable that we were just talking about, then the atmosphere and the vibe of the place is paramount. The feel factor is so critical. It's like going to a party and you know right away whether you fit in or not. You can tell if this is a place that you want to hang out or this is a place where I never want to go to again. Sometimes we equate it to like the first time you went into a restaurant that you've never been to. And if the service is bad, if you can't really understand what's on the menu, if the servers don't seem to care whether you're there or not, the chances are good that you're never going to go back there. That's it. That first impression is critical. And if we want to see people come into healthy, holistic relationship with Jesus, we have got to be thinking about the vibe of our place on a regular basis.

If you're listening to this and you're like, where do I even begin taking those five factors that you talked about earlier and inviting someone how you said like you didn't know your church was weird until your sister in law told you. Inviting someone who doesn't go to your church or maybe they're from another church, a trusted person to come in and give you feedback. And then something that you could do with your staff that may be really helpful. I had a leader who once said for staff meeting, hey, we're all going to go, we're going on a field trip today, we're going offsite. We got in the church van, drove in a circle around the church, and then we came back to our parking lot. And they said, everybody get out your notes and you're going to write down what you're going to evaluate from the front steps of the church or the parking lot all the way to the walk through the building and tell me what your first impression is of everything you see. And it was just a very practical step that someone could take to start this journey of even getting yourself to start thinking in this way. If it's not part of your normal every day, if you're not a leader who thinks that way and you want to get there, that's a great first step.

That's awesome. I remember we had a guy just video from walking in from the parking lot into the building. When we looked at that as a leadership team, we were so embarrassed over so many things that we missed. Again, it was a culture thing. You don't realize the water you're swimming in. For heaven's sakes, pay a pagan 25 bucks to come and then take them to the lunch afterwards with a bunch of questions and ask them, what did you feel? What did you see? What did you think?

This is gold. Sarah Lau from Next Level Church. Thank you for being here. Dave Workman, as always. For the rest of you all, we're so glad that you were here. We want to say this again. We always say it. You are not alone. So don't try to do it alone. We are better in community. So if you need help, we're available here at the Elemental Group. 

And let me butt in here for a minute, Paul. At our website, we actually have an assessment tool called Vibe that helps the church team view their services and website through the lens of an outsider with about 120 questions to dialogue on.

And hey, if you're enjoying this podcast, why not pass it along to another leader? Until our next episode, we'll say have a beautiful day. We'll talk to you soon. 

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