This is a brief story about a recent experience I had at a McDonald’s that has important lessons for us at church.  At the end of it, let me know what you think.

Monieca and I drove to KY earlier this week to help her mom move into a nursing home.  To save time we stopped at a McDonald’s in VA for a quick dinner.  Like most McDonald’s this one had a digital menu above the counter.  I looked and looked but was unable to find the dollar menu.  I also noticed the dessert menu was missing.

Since we were the only customers at the counter, I did what I often do – I struck up a conversation with the staff.  I asked them, “Where’s the dollar menu?”  They pointed me to one of the digital panels on the end that rotated promotions of various foods and told me that the dollar menu would eventually appear on that panel.  So I stood there waiting, but it never appeared.  The dessert menu did appear as part of the rotation, but the dollar menu never did.  Making matters worse, when the dessert menu did appear it didn’t stay visible long enough for me to read all of it.

The staff was friendly and during the next seven or eight minutes we all just laughed and said something must be wrong with it.  I joked that it must be management’s way of discouraging people from ordering from the dollar menu.

Fortunately I know the McDonald’s menu well enough that I was able to order what I wanted anyway.  But this got me thinking.  What if a customer wasn’t familiar with the menu?  They would not even know there was a dollar menu.  What if there were a lot of customers and one of them decided to stand there for two minutes just waiting for the dollar menu to circle through the rotation?  Can you imagine the delay in service that would create for all the other customers?

The bottom line is customers want menus to be clear and easy to find.  Wasted time leads to frustration.  A menu that visibly rotates instead of being constantly visible to customers creates frustration.

What does this have to do with church?

When new people come to a church for the first time, they don’t know the menu.  This is especially true if they are lost or didn’t grow up attending church.  Those of us who show up every Sunday take the menu for granted because we have it memorized.  We don’t even need a copy of it.

Helping new people on Sundays is one the most important things any of do on Sunday.  Helping them means we need good directional signage and an effective welcome ministry.  But it also includes you and me talking to people we don’t know.  Every time you see someone you don’t know at church, you should go to them and introduce yourself.  Ask if they need any help.  Consider yourself our church’s customer service representative to each and every person you don’t know on Sundays.

Help us do everything we can to make it easy and simple for our guests on Sundays.  After all – the Bible says that we show our love by our actions.  That includes our actions toward new people at church on Sunday mornings.

Pastor Steve Hogg