“THE Death of the Hired Man” by Robert Frost is a unprecedented poem. In a deceptively easy narrative style, it relates the discussion between a farmer and his wife over whether to supply shelter to the itinerant labourer whose work has been somewhat unsatisfactory previously.
Silas has arrived at their doorstep, “a miserable sight — and frightening too”. Warren is unwilling to supply him employment again, but Mary’s kind heart won’t allow him to show away a person who has “nothing to look backward to with pride and nothing to stay up for with hope”. She believes that he has “come home to die”, which feeling gives rise to the well-known phrases: “Home is the place where, when you have got to go there They must take you in,” and “I must have called it Something you someway haven’t to deserve.” Warren is persuaded to supply Silas work with a purpose to keep his pride, but this offer is redundant: Silas, worn out by life and aware of reaching sanctuary finally, has died.
In an odd, lyrical way, this poem sums up the enjoyment and the challenge of the “welcoming church”: the grace-filled obligation to simply accept in Jesus’s name every body who seeks entry to the worshipping community, irrespective of who they’re or what they could imagine. Every church leader, I believe, secretly prides themselves on their welcoming attitude to stranger and seasoned churchgoer alike, and, if we’re occasionally troubled by a sense that perhaps not everyone feels immediately “at home”, then how easy it’s to reassure ourselves that the fault lies, if not with the congregation, then definitely with one or two trickier members of it.
Enter the mystery worshipper — the offspring of the Ship of Fools website, begun in 1998 and still operating today. In this project, “volunteers are invited to participate in church services worldwide, from Singapore to San Francisco, from Brisbane to Bombay, to file a first-timer’s impression of the way it was to be in church that day.” The aim is to “help churches recover at what they do”, using honest reporting from a visitor’s perspective.
This concept has been taken a step further by Lichfield diocese, which took part in a trial for the Everybody Welcome training programme for churches. A team of trained mystery worshippers were invited by churches to go to them “as strangers” and report on the welcome that they received. Armed with an intensive questionnaire, covering many various facets of welcome, the mystery worshipper would report back to the host church on their experience. Since its starting in 2008, greater than 200 churches within the Lichfield diocese have been visited.
The pandemic naturally put a pause on such events, but Richard Barrett, the chief assistant to the mission team, has been a part of the project since its inception and stays smitten by its advantages. He jogged my memory that the mystery-worshipper scheme is just a component of the Everybody Welcome project, a broader all-member programme, complete with workbooks and course guidelines.
The Everybody Welcome website www.everybodywelcome.org accommodates links to guidelines and questionnaires for this project, but it surely doesn’t must be this complicated. One of probably the most successful mystery-worshipper events that I led involved a small town congregation’s simply not holding the most important morning worship one Sunday. Instead, your entire congregation was encouraged to go to a church that that they had not been to before and to report back. More than 40 people did just this, reporting a combination of interactions, from one young couple who were told to maneuver seats not only once, but twice, to a different one who was so enamoured of the service that they were in two minds whether to hitch that congregation.
This form of event approaches welcome from the alternative side from the Lichfield Project: as an alternative of 1 one who visits a church and experiences the welcome, a complete community change into “strangers”, bringing that have to bear on their home church.
There were several outcomes from this exercise, a lot of which were practical, however the most dear consequence was less tangible: an increased awareness among the many whole church community of what it seems like to be a stranger in church. The sense of vulnerability, of uncertainty of welcome, and of relief if that welcome was forthcoming fed right into a renewed determination to supply a real welcome to every body who arrived on the church door.
An exercise equivalent to this might well grow to be a willingness to embark on the lengthier and more demanding Everybody Welcome programme. Even if this doesn’t occur, a church might well experience a growth in understanding of the character of church community, in addition to the less worthy but none the less real enjoyment of actually being authorised for once to hunt down the speck in other people’s eyes reasonably than be made consistently aware of the log in a single’s own.
The Revd Dr Sally Welch is the Vicar of the Kington Group within the diocese of Hereford.
