young man just walked through the front door of your church for the first time. Or is it the first time?

An elderly woman and her daughter have been attending your church for several months, but they always leave as soon as the worship service has ended. They appear to desire no other contact.

Forging new relationships within the church walls can be one of the most challenging – and most important – assignments any Christian will accept.

Dean Apel

Pastor Dean Apel of Lord of Life Lutheran Church, Wichita, Kansas, cites the apostle Paul’s advice when meeting someone for the first time: “Love must be sincere….” (Romans 12:9)

“Don’t judge a book by its cover,” Apel says. “Be open to the new person as you would be open to God himself. What can the new person teach you? How would the person enrich your life?”

“Asking these questions can make us humble and expectant in the encounter. We can be sensitive to the needs of the new acquaintance and ready to serve them in those needs.”

Too often, church members may decide not to reach out at all, says Pastor Laurie Jones of Ballard First Lutheran Church in Seattle, Washington.

“Some are hesitant to approach people they don’t know for fear the newcomer might actually be a newer (or even a longtime) member they don’t know. I try to encourage people to introduce themselves to people by saying ‘Hi, I’m so and so, and I don’t think we’ve met.’ That way, if they happen to be members, it’s no harm, no foul, and hopefully they’ll at least exchange names.”

“Also, welcome people indiscriminately. Don’t pounce on people with children because you want to increase the numbers of families in your community. I’ve heard of retirees who move across country and visit churches with the intention of entering fully into a new community, and no one approaches them, almost as if they have nothing to offer. Big mistake! Everyone who comes through the doors has gifts to share.”

For individuals who are already part of your church family, but not actively engaged beyond Sunday worship, there are any number of ways to connect, says Apel, who lists the following possibilities:

• Some say the coffee hour is the most important hour on Sunday morning. While a pastor might say that worship and preaching are actually the most important, a lot of ministry gets done in the small talk before and after worship. Most congregations provide potlucks and other opportunities for those kinds of informal encounters. These help establish initial levels of trust and points of interest between members.
• To develop more than surface relationships, congregations must also offer small group opportunities for prayer and study. Most people will not share their deepest sorrows and joys over coffee in the narthex or fellowship hall. But in a group of ten or less in an atmosphere of prayer, study and listening, many will share such concerns. When a smaller group hears, understands and accepts those sorrows and joys, meaningful relationships can be formed. The group can rejoice with those who rejoice and mourn with those who mourn.
• Meaningful relationships can be established and maintained through simple hospitality. When the Apel family lived in Kenya, we had more invitations to eat with people or even to stay at their house than we could ever possibly accept. Here in our community in North America, it is rather seldom we are invited to someone’s house for a meal. And yet hospitality is one of the virtues most extolled in the New Testament. Together one-on-one, couple-on-couple or family-on-family, in a home, people get to know each other and share each other’s lives.
• Those who have extra time or an extra burden from the Lord to minister through relationships might give special attention to those who are most relationally needy in a congregation — perhaps single individuals, including those are recently divorced or widowed, or those who are geographically removed from their biological families.

Relationship challenges

Even church members with the best of intentions, however, can build relationships and then inadvertently tear them down with the sins of selfishness, pride, gossip or hypocrisy, says Jones.

“To think that somehow the church is exempt from these sins would be akin to burying our heads in the sand or thinking utopia exists. If we understand ourselves as both saint and sinner, and that there is no right way of thinking, doing or acting, that can save us from our sinfulness – rather, that we are saved by the grace of God – then we can go back to the basics and learn to forgive as we have been forgiven.”

Successful relationships are based on the kind of selflessness Paul described to the church in Rome when he said: “Each of us should please his neighbor for his good, to build him up. For even Christ did not please himself ….” (Romans 15:2-3)

“Christians can fall down when they look only for what they can get out of a relationship. When they no longer derive a benefit from the relationship, they can easily abandon it,” Apel says. “But the Christian will want to judge the value of the relationship more on what she or he can put into the relationship than on what she or he can get out of it.”

Building lives

For those who come to church seeking a connection to others around them, the benefits of relationships can be life-changing.

“I know people who come searching for healing from deep wounds and find love and acceptance in a way they hadn’t experienced anywhere else,” Jones says. “Recently, a woman told me she felt a hundred pounds lighter after finally hearing that God did not desire to condemn her. For the first time in her life, the burden that had weighed her down was lifted as she heard God’s word of grace.”

“I also know several young adult males who years ago formed friendships with their peers, and a very gifted youth director who accepted them just as they were during their rebellious, adolescent years, and these young men continue to remain connected to the faith community because of that youth director’s impact on their lives at a time when most adults would have just as soon written them off as troublemakers or worse!”

“I’m personally a big proponent of using the language of church as family,” Jones states. “The church is one of the last institutions where the five living generations come together under one roof for a common purpose — to love and worship God in order to go out to love and serve our neighbors.”