My parish is extremely good at welcoming new people. Our parishioners, particularly our young families, are good at noticing who is new, introducing ourselves to them, and getting them plugged into the parish.
Recently, though, I couldn’t shake the feeling we were missing people. I started noticing new people and then not seeing them again for weeks. Another member of the parish council and I decided we needed to be more proactive in finding these people.
So, to fix it, we decided to start something we’re calling the Welcome Table.
The cost of missing people
When I was working at a parish in Pennsylvania, we had a parishioner named Tom. Tom ended up being one of our key volunteers. He was at everything — evangelization team, parish council; he was everywhere. He did so much for that church.
The crazy thing is, we didn’t know about Tom for the first six months he was in town.
He moved to the area and started going to Mass every week, same Mass time and same church. Nobody talked to him for six months. He came from a great parish out in Kansas, and he had a lot of really good ideas about how to renew a church and build it up and get us through our merger, and all of that just sat in a pew for half a year because nobody said hello to him.
I used to ask myself: what if we’d had Tom six months earlier?
In the first year he was active at that parish, he was everywhere. Imagine if we’d had him for 50% more of the time. Who knows what else he could have done.
Every parish has a Tom in it right now, or at least a future Tom. Every week you don’t meet him and bring him into the life of the parish, you’re missing a massive opportunity.
The fix is simple
The Welcome Table is a Third Floor ministry (focused on evangelization). You put a table in the courtyard space after Mass or another common area. Two or three people man the table and talk to new people.
Think of it as a mini parish office that runs on Sundays. Somebody walks up with a question (how do I sign my kid up for First Communion, I want to become Catholic, I just moved here, etc.) Then a real person answers their question, gets their name, and follows up to make sure they’ve been connected.
It’s also an easy on-ramp to evangelization. It’s hard to convince people to get out into the streets and start knocking on doors, so this gets their feet wet without ever leaving the building.
To be clear, this is not an advertising table. Nobody goes to an event or signs up for a ministry because of a pamphlet they picked up on their way out. People go to events because they have a relationship with somebody at the event.
So you build the relationship first, and the events take care of themselves after that.
So why doesn’t every parish have one?
Every parish has a million tables stored somewhere on campus, so every parish should be able to do this. But obviously getting the table isn’t the hard part. Getting it approved is the hard part.
If you want to do this at your parish, you will naturally meet some kind of resistance. Most people think that resistance comes from a place of malice, but that is rarely the case.
You’ll be tempted to think they don’t care about evangelization, or they’re protecting their turf. Usually that isn’t it at all. Everybody who makes a decision is running a cost-benefit analysis, and they’re saying no because they don’t want the added workload if they don’t see the benefit.
So in addition to the logistics of setting up and running a welcome table, you’ll have to learn how to sell the idea of the welcome table.
Fortunately, selling (or negotiation or however you want to describe it) is a learnable skill. Once you know the right ways to present it to different stakeholders at the parish and how to overcome their objections (everyone will have different kinds), it will be simple.
It can make getting a welcome table approved at your parish a two-week project instead of a two-year one.
So I built the whole thing out for you and put it in one place.
The Welcome Table Starter Pack
Pitch Guide
How to get it approved when you have no influence.
Who to talk to and in what order
Why committees always discuss toward a no and how to beat that before the meeting starts.
The objections you’re going to hear: liability, safe environment, cost, “we already have hospitality,” “we tried that once.”
A one-page proposal to leave behind in every meeting.
Welcome Table SOP
The operating manual for whoever’s standing at the table.
What to say first, how to run the conversation, what to write down, where to physically put the table and what goes on it, what to do when you don’t know the answer.
The follow-up system, which is the part that quietly kills most of these ministries when it’s missing.
Ministry Organizer
Every ministry in your parish on one spreadsheet so your volunteers can connect somebody in thirty seconds instead of saying “I think there’s a group for that.”
Scheduler
All of it is fill-in-the-blank, none of it assumes you’re on staff, and none of it costs your parish a dollar to start.
If you’ve been waiting around for your parish to start something like this, you’re the one who starts it.
Everything’s below.
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