Hospitality is about caring for the emotions of the guest just as much as it is about serving them, according to Jason Young and Jonathan Malm in their book The Comeback Effect: How Hospitality Can Compel Your Church’s Guests to Return. We need to reimagine what it means to be the guest and what it means to add feeling back into it.
Although the book is written from the perspective of a large church in which attracting and retaining guests at weekly services is a major element of the church’s outreach strategy, the principles of hospitality are applicable to any type of church gathering and to many types of businesses and other organisations. A truly hospitable church is one which has made hospitality a defining feature of its culture, an expectation of every member rather than just a job which some people are rostered to do each week. Hospitality involves understanding how the guest is feeling, and taking active steps to make the guest’s experience a positive one.
In my opinion this is an interesting and helpful book. Most churches focus on trying to get the content of the service right, but they often overlook the details of a guest’s experience – any factors which may produce positive or negative emotions – which may often have a greater effect on the guest’s response and willingness to return than the content. This book provides many useful ideas for improving standards of hospitality in a church.