A Warm Welcome: Follow These Steps to Attract Visitors to Your Parish

Many of us have been there — looking for a Mass to attend while we’re traveling, or new to town and nervous about what parish might welcome us home. Holidays provide a unique opportunity to connect with visitors to your parish seeking community, solace, and spiritual fulfillment. If your parish wants to provide a warm welcome for those new to your community and make it easy for visitors to access everything your parish has to offer, consider our holiday visitor checklist: 

Help Visitors Find Your Parish

• Update your website, bulletin, and any outdoor signs with accurate Mass times and office hours.
  
  
• Prominently feature images on your website that include people in them. Having photos with parishioners engaging in your community on your site, instead of images of your buildings and empty interiors, helps those interested in visiting envision themselves as part of your community. For some ideas, check out these 5 examples of photos every parish needs.
  
  
• Be sure that your parish website is optimized to be mobile-friendly. Need help with this? Our web design team can help. Remember, over 50% of people searching for a church to attend are using their phones, tablets or other mobile devices for that search!
  
  
• Clearly mark areas like your parking lot, sanctuary entrance, bathroom, nursery, office entrance, and anything else you think a visitor may find important.
  
  
• Be sure your website is easy to navigate so that information about your ministries and services are easy for visitors to find when looking you up.
  
  
• If your parish uses social media, be sure that your profile information is up to date and that your profiles include images of your parishioners engaging with the church community to showcase how warm and welcoming you are. 

Once a Visitor Walks Through Your Doors 

• Place welcome cards in the pews for visitors to fill out if they want to receive more information about the parish directly to their email or via a phone call.
  
  
• Display information about your faith formation programs for youth and adults in a place visitors can easily see when they enter your parish.
  
  
• Are your buildings, including your sanctuary, disability friendly?
  
  
• Provide tools for families with small children like a coloring page that corresponds with the readings and some crayons, or directions to the nursery if they have an infant and need a quiet space. We have resources available for these in our WeCreate library of Catholic content for you to use!
  
  
• Have extra bulletins ready to be passed out to accommodate larger crowds around the holidays.
  
  
• Be sure any Mass announcements include information on how to register or how to gather more information about the parish and what your community has to offer.
  
  
• Consider having gifts for visitors like a gift bag with some church merch, a pamphlet about your parish ministries, and a letter from your pastor or staff inviting them to register.
  
  
• Update your parish bulletin design to be modern and professional looking if it isn’t’ already. If your bulletin is outdated and looks home-made, visitors may think your parish is also outdated. Need help with a bulletin refresh? We provide this service for free for our bulletin customers! If your design is locked in but you need more professionally designed, royalty free Catholic imagery, we have you covered with our content inside of WeCreate.

Make Mass More Visitor Friendly

• Your pastor could invite everyone to introduce themselves to their neighbors at the beginning of Mass.

• Invite those attending to share a prayer request with their neighbors before Mass.
  
  
• Include a printed program or handout that explains the parts of Mass for visitors to reference.
  
  
• Train greeters and ushers with knowledge about the parish ministries so they can connect interested visitors.
  
  
• Provide a prayer team to pray with those who feel in need of prayer after Mass. 

Remember, folks may be visiting for a short period of time to be with friends or family, in town for work, just passing through, new to the neighborhood and looking for a church home, or simply exploring Church for the first time. Regardless of the reason, we hope that visitors will feel welcome and blessed by your vibrant community with this guide.

“Welcome one another, then, as Christ welcomed you, for the glory of God.” – Romans 15:7