Everything Communicates

Photo by Mikhail Nilov (Pexels)

In a recent staff meeting, we went over a simple but profound idea. It’s not a new one, but it is one that needs constant re-emphasizing. 

“Everything communicates.”

Think about your church. The first impression of a guest begins the moment they drive onto the parking lot. If they see a professional entrance area and sign, neatly manicured lawns and flower beds, no signs of trash, bushes and hedges trimmed, it communicates.

When they see a team of men and women with smiles on their faces, professionally guiding them into a parking space, it creates an atmosphere of not only excitement (similar to the experience of a game or concert), but also communicates professionalism, organization and care. 

But that’s just the start.

The friendliness exhibited by the person who greets them at the door, the nature of the signage, the cleanliness of the bathrooms,

... it communicates.

Let’s stick with cleanliness for a minute.

Do you know how McDonald’s got to be the world’s largest restaurant chain? Early on, it was their clean bathrooms for road-weary travelers. 

I’ll never forget a story I heard about Ray Kroc, the person who turned McDonald’s into the franchise juggernaut it now is. When he paid a “surprise” visit to a Winnipeg franchise, it is reported that he found a single fly.

The franchisee lost his McDonald’s franchise two weeks later.  

Another tale of Kroc’s commitment to cleanliness tells how, on his way back to the office from lunch, Kroc asked his driver to pass through several McDonald’s parking lots. In one of those parking lots, Kroc spotted some papers caught up in the shrubs along the outer fence. Immediately he went to the nearest pay phone and called the office, got the name of the local manager, and then called the manager to offer to help him pick up the trash in the parking lot. Then Kroc, the owner of the chain, along with the young manager of the store, met in the parking lot and got down on their hands and knees to pick up the paper. 

What, exactly, do things such as these communicate? They trumpet how people should feel about the message and overall reliability of the entire enterprise. I like how one airline executive put it: “Coffee stains on the flip-down trays [in the airplane] mean [to the passenger] that we do our engine maintenance wrong.” For the church, coffee stains on the flip-down trays mean that maybe we’re getting the message about eternal life wrong.

So that’s worth being the world’s greatest wiper-upper of coffee stains. 

So ask yourself: 

Is there a light bulb out somewhere? 
A room that needs painting?
A stain on a carpet?
A crack in the floor?
A beat-up toy?

The unchurched who come to your church for the first time are looking for anything – anything – to try to write it all off. If we give them something that communicates that we don’t take Jesus seriously – that somehow, we aren’t giving Him and His message and His mission our best – then they have a right to question it. We have communicated to them our lack of commitment and enthusiasm. If there’s more commitment to quality and excellence in a retail store whose only motivation is profit, what does that say about us and our commitment to Christ?

And let’s be clear: this isn’t about the number of people you have on staff, the number of volunteers, or the size of your budget. The achievement of excellence is not about any of those things. Excellence is nothing more and nothing less than doing the best you can with what you have. Which means every church can communicate excellence. 

Think about a meeting you’ve scheduled at your church where you’ve invited first-time guests or volunteers. Or maybe it’s a meeting where you’re wanting to invite them to become volunteers, or maybe just to explore the church as prospective members.

Regardless, since everything communicates, before the meeting ask yourself:

Did you skirt the tables?
Vacuum the room?
Put out water bottles?
Have background music playing?
Have a graphic related to the meeting on a screen?
Start on time?
Have handouts (and were those handouts typo-free)?

Everything communicates. 

A toilet that needed cleaning.
A song that needed rehearsing.
Trash that needed picking up.
Check-in that needed rethinking.
A platform that needed diversifying.
A talk that needed researching.

It has often been written that there are only four ways we have contact with the world:

1. What we do.
2. How we look.
3. What we say.
4. How we say it.

So...

What are you doing?
How are you looking?
What are you saying?
How are you saying it?

Everything communicates,

... which means everything matters.

James Emery White