The Sing! Getty Music Worship conference gave us an opportunity to ask well more than a hundred people this question:  What do you like about your church?

Conference organizers invited the more than 6,000 attendees to participate in an exhibitor passport scavenger hunt! Attendees were given a booklet with all exhibiting organizations’ names inside and a place to get the booklet stamped when they visited each booth. Attendees who completed the scavenger hunt by getting stamps in their passport from all exhibitors were entered to win a prize pack.

Because of the scavenger hunt and the motivation to win a prize, we had many people stopping by our booth just to get a stamp.  We decided to make people interact with us before they could get our stamp. We asked people two questions:

1) Where are you from geographically (we had to add ‘geographically’ because one of the early visitors to our booth answered that she was from her mother’s womb); and 2) What do you like about your church?

There were two answers that stood out as the most popular answers to that question:  because we are a family and because of the teaching and/or preaching at our church. These were excellent answers.  Unfortunately, we also got people who hesitated on the question, and then answered along these lines – there are lots of problems at our church right now.

One answer we seldom heard was – because of the outreach or evangelism of our church.

Our questions opened the door for many long conversations with people.  People seemed genuinely glad that we made them interact with us rather than just giving them a stamp and letting them move on the next booth.  People also expressed appreciation for the question about their church. As a result, we had people that were willing to tell us quite a lot about their church. For those that enjoyed telling us more about their church, we asked more specifically about the outreach and evangelism of their church.  Only a few people thought that outreach and evangelism is something their church does well. Some even told us that unfortunately, this is something that isn’t emphasized in their church.

That made the churches that told us that they do outreach and evangelism well stand out from the crowd.  For the ones that did it well, it was something that was emphasized in the church. We were glad to hear a few tell us that Christianity Explored is something that helps their church in outreach and evangelism.

What about you?  What would you say your church does well?