I received this book for free in exchange for an honest review.
The Come Back Effect lays out the approach that North Point Ministries uses in connecting with guests in an effort to bring them into the ministry regularly. Jason Young and Jonathan Malm come from a guest services background. The approach they highlight is very practical for churches to put into place.
The basic theme is the subject of hospitality. The overall message is one of moving the focus of a church from providing a comfortable environment for the established church to providing an intentional comfortable and welcoming environment for guests. The practical suggestions are about taking your current collection of people, training them for maximum hospitality toward guests, and then empowering to live out their individual personality and gift or skill set in welcoming people who may have never had contact with the church.
The strongest chapters that Young and Malm bring to this book are chapters on Recover Quickly (doing what you can to improve upon a failure in hospitality), Reject Okay (moving toward doing things better and better), and Values Over Policies (reinforcing a culture directed toward a set of core values instead of writing a binding policy for every conceivable event). But, by far, the best chapter has to be Reach for Significance. This drives home that the person who serves in the church needs to feel valued in the work they do. They need to be treated as a valued individual. And they, in turn, need to do their work creating that same value for the contacts they make with others. These 4 chapters are a solid framework for the rest of the material.
The weakest areas that I found, personally, are not faults in the approach. They stem more from my own point of view regarding hospitality in the church. It also comes from my own readings, especially of the best practices of the Walt Disney Company.
The Come Back Effect lays out the approach that North Point Ministries uses in connecting with guests in an effort to bring them into the ministry regularly. Jason Young and Jonathan Malm come from a guest services background. The approach they highlight is very practical for churches to put into place.
The basic theme is the subject of hospitality. The overall message is one of moving the focus of a church from providing a comfortable environment for the established church to providing an intentional comfortable and welcoming environment for guests. The practical suggestions are about taking your current collection of people, training them for maximum hospitality toward guests, and then empowering to live out their individual personality and gift or skill set in welcoming people who may have never had contact with the church.
The strongest chapters that Young and Malm bring to this book are chapters on Recover Quickly (doing what you can to improve upon a failure in hospitality), Reject Okay (moving toward doing things better and better), and Values Over Policies (reinforcing a culture directed toward a set of core values instead of writing a binding policy for every conceivable event). But, by far, the best chapter has to be Reach for Significance. This drives home that the person who serves in the church needs to feel valued in the work they do. They need to be treated as a valued individual. And they, in turn, need to do their work creating that same value for the contacts they make with others. These 4 chapters are a solid framework for the rest of the material.
The weakest areas that I found, personally, are not faults in the approach. They stem more from my own point of view regarding hospitality in the church. It also comes from my own readings, especially of the best practices of the Walt Disney Company.
- There are many allusions to Disney's way of doing things. There is language borrowed (knowing the guest, scenes, referring to the "story" that is being told, "bumping the lamp") that is fairly narrow to the training that Disney does. That is not a problem. Disney trains many organizations in their style of doing things. I found it troubling that there are no references to Disney's books or training over those approaches.
- There is a backwards view on hospitality. Hospitality is defined from the beginning as being dependent upon the guest. "If {service} doesn't connect with the emotions of the guest, it isn't hospitality. Hospitality is about the feeling. (p.18)" "Hospitality is about caring for the emotions of the guest.... (p.20)" I come at hospitality from a biblical perspective where it represents the openness of the host to receive whomever enters in and treating them all, equally, to the same standard of sharing life. Even the enemy of ones family could not be treated less in a biblical understanding of hospitality. Plus, there is the theological aspect that God's hospitality includes all. None of this depends on or even has reference to the guests feelings. It is truly the feeling of the host.
- That brings me to my last weakness of this book. There is a lack of clear connection to biblical themes of any sort. There are no references to Scripture to undergird the concepts. There are no theological aspects regarding love or grace.
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