Your church is like a family expecting guests, and you should be ready to show them intentional hospitality when they arrive, according to Nelson Searcy and Jennifer Dykes Henson in their book Fusion: turning first-time guests into fully-engaged members of your church. It’s a complete book solely on the topic of welcoming people to church, and it turns the welcome into a fully elaborated science. The authors claim that almost any church can experience substantial growth just through keeping a reasonable proportion of the visitors who come each week.
The welcoming or “assimilation” process starts in the first seven minutes which a visitor spends at your church. It is important to make a positive first impression, and this can be broken down into how well the visitor is greeted, directed, treated and seated. In order to follow up a visitor, it is necessary to obtain the visitor’s contact details, and the book goes into some detail about ways of doing this sensitively. Next, there is discussion of different ways of following up, how to plan the experience of a second-time visitor, and how to turn a second-time vistor into a regular attender, and then into a member.
I think that each church needs to make its own decisions as to the best ways to effect welcoming and follow-up within their own cultural contexts, so unless your cultural context is very similar to that of the authors’ church you may need to make your own decisions concerning types of food offered to visitors or the frequency and nature of follow-up. However, the book and its accompanying website are very valuable in exploring in some detail the different issues which need to be considered.