Revisiting the Classic Hospitality Checklist

Your parking lot is the first room of your church. Before a visitor hears a sermon, hears a hymn, or meets an usher, that visitor has already formed an impression from the state of the lot, the walkway, the door, and the person standing inside it. A hospitality audit is an old tool for greeters and pastors: you walk the route a stranger walks, in the order a stranger walks it, and you note what helps and what hinders. This article revisits that audit for congregations doing this work today.

The details cited in this entry were checked on the Wikipedia entry on hospitality.

The audit does not begin in the narthex. It begins when the car stops.

Why start the walk in the parking lot

Walk your own lot on a Sunday morning at the hour a first-time visitor is most likely to arrive. Check the signage from the street. If a driver cannot tell within a few seconds where the main entrance is, that driver is already working harder than a guest should have to work. Note the condition of the walkways, the clarity of the accessible route, and whether a person on foot can see the door from where the car is parked. None of this requires a committee meeting, only a slow walk with a notepad.

The purpose of the audit is not to make your building impressive. It is to remove small obstacles so that the welcome itself can be received. Congregations that audit their own route often find that the obstacles are not architectural at all, but informational: a sign that points in the wrong direction, a door that looks locked when it is open, an entry that only regular attenders know to use.

What does the word hospitality actually cover

The word itself is broader than a greeting team. Hospitality is the relationship of a host towards a guest, in which the host receives the guest with some amount of goodwill and welcome. That definition includes the reception and entertainment of guests, visitors, or strangers, and it is not limited to a handshake at a doorway. The Encyclopédie described it as the virtue of a great soul that cares for the whole universe through the ties of humanity.

Etymology usefully widens the frame here. The English word descends from the Latin hospes, which means host, guest, or stranger. Hospes is formed from hostis, meaning stranger or enemy, which is also the root behind the word hostile. The same family gives English its words for host, hospitality, hospice, hostel, and hotel. The tension inside the word is the same tension a greeter faces: the stranger at the door is both guest and potential threat, and the practice of hospitality is what the host does with that tension.

In ancient cultures, the practice involved welcoming the stranger and offering food, shelter, and safety. That older shape of hospitality was not principally about politeness. It was about protection. Celtic societies valued hospitality especially in terms of protection: a host who granted a person's request for refuge was expected not only to provide food and shelter but also to make sure the guest did not come to harm under that host's care. A modern audit rarely addresses physical danger, but it can still ask a version of the same question. Does a stranger who walks through your door come to any harm under your care, however mild?

Which welcome does the Christian tradition describe

Christianity treats hospitality as a virtue, a reminder of sympathy for strangers and a rule to welcome visitors. The Hebrew scriptures supply the pattern through Abraham and Lot in the Book of Genesis, and the practice is called hachnasat orchim, the welcoming of guests. Jewish custom expects hosts to provide nourishment, comfort, and entertainment for their guests, and to escort them out at the end of the visit with a wish for safe travel. Abraham's standard is described in three elements: achila, feeding; shtiya, drinking; and linah, lodging. The initial letters of those Hebrew words spell Aishel.

In the New Testament, Jesus taught that those who had welcomed a stranger had welcomed him, and he expanded the meaning of brother and neighbor to include the stranger. Pope John Paul II wrote that welcoming brothers and sisters with care and willingness must not be limited to extraordinary occasions but must become a habit of service in daily life, and he said that only those who have opened their hearts to Christ can offer a hospitality that is never formal or superficial but identified by gentleness and reverence. One Christian writer quoted in the same tradition puts a sharper edge on it: a guest should never be made to feel that they are causing undue extra labor by their presence.

That last line is worth carrying into the parking lot. If a visitor's arrival visibly burdens the people at the door, the audit has found its work.

Where does the stranger become a guest

Anthropology has analyzed hospitality as an unequal relation between hosts and guests, mediated through various forms of exchange. That inequality is real in a congregation. The visitor knows nothing of your building, your habits, or your order of service, and the host knows everything. Jacques Derrida worked this problem into a model that separates unconditional hospitality from conditional hospitality, and labeled the intrinsic conflict inside the practice with the portmanteau hostipitality. His point is that an inclusion implies an exclusion: those welcomed in the sacred law of hospitality are welcomed at the price of others being left outside.

A greeter does not need to resolve that paradox, but the audit can make it visible. Ask where the welcome stops. Does it extend to the visitor who arrives late, the one who speaks little English, the one who is dressed unlike the rest of the room, the one who asks the difficult question during coffee hour? Hospitality reduces tension in host and guest encounters, producing a liminal zone that combines curiosity about others with fear of strangers, and the audit measures which of the two your congregation is actually operating from.

What the audit looks like on paper

Keep it to one page. Walk the route in order, name what you saw, and assign a single owner for each change. You can read a fuller account of the concept and its history in the entry on hospitality, which gathers the traditions and the scholarship in one place.

  Stop on the route
  What to check
  Who owns the fix




  Street and drive
  Sign legible from the road; entrance visible
  Trustees


  Parking lot
  Accessible route clear; lighting; no trip hazards
  Building and grounds


  Walkway
  Guest can see the door and knows it is the right one
  Greeters


  Main door
  Door is held, named, and genuinely open
  Greeting team


  Narthex
  Someone greets within the first minute; no one is left standing alone
  Welcome coordinator


  Pew or chair
  Order of service explained; hymnal location shown
  Ushers


  Coffee hour
  One person sits with the visitor rather than points
  Fellowship committee


  Departed
  Visitor is escorted out and wished a safe journey
  Greeters


  Week after
  Follow-up contact made by a named person
  Pastor or lay leader

Do the greeters know what the guest needs first

The audit exposes an assumption that many greeting teams hold without knowing it: that the guest's first need is conversation. Often it is orientation. A visitor wants to know where to sit, when to stand, which door leads to the restroom, and whether children are expected in the service. Greeters who can answer those questions in one sentence each have done more than greeters who offer a long and warm introduction. Train the team on the five most common questions and the shortest true answers.

Then train them on the second half of the work. Jewish custom sets the pattern of escorting guests out at the end of the visit, and the Catholic writer quoted above warns against making a guest feel they are causing extra labor. Both habits point the same way. The visitor should leave without having had to manage the host's feelings.

Who follows up, and when

An audit that ends at the door has missed the point. Hospitality is a relationship across time, and in the Christian tradition it is a habit of service rather than an occasional performance. Assign a named person to make contact within the week, and make the contact specific: not a generic note, but a reference to something the visitor said or asked. If the congregation cannot name that person before Sunday, the audit is incomplete.

Review the sheet quarterly. The parking lot degrades. New staff arrive. Signage fades. The audit is less a project than a rhythm, and the congregations that do it well tend to treat it as a standing item rather than a one-time event.

Where does the audit stop being useful

There is a limit worth naming. An audit can measure signage, lighting, the timing of a greeting, the presence of a follow-up call. It cannot measure whether a guest was actually received with goodwill, because no checklist can see that. The relationship itself remains the host's work, and the audit only clears the ground for it.

Kristeva warned against what she called perverse hospitality, which takes advantage of the vulnerability of aliens to dispossess them. The warning applies to congregations too, in miniature. A welcome extended in order to recruit, retain, or grow a budget is not the welcome the tradition describes. The audit can detect that failure in one question: does the guest's welfare matter to you independently of what the guest might contribute? Walk the route this Sunday with that question in hand, and let the answer set your first change.