What's in a Name?

I saw a best seller title the other day.  It was, “The ONE Thing.”  Subtitle:  What Successful People Do.  Those cover words get you thinking, don’t they?  What do successful people do?  If you had to boil down your opinion about what makes for success, what one thing would you point out?  

We all probably want a few one things.  How do you make it just one??  I suspect that is part of the book’s message, that successful people do get one goal or one principle to shine, do get from the many goods to the one best.  

After a Sunday School class the other day I walked out thinking that the one thing that can help churches, and individuals for that matter, has to do with names.  In churches, we look at health.  Typically, healthy organisms grow.  Even when we have physically matured we would describe health as growing mentally or relationally or spiritually.

For churches to grow they need an inner dynamic.  Something of genuine value and meaning is going on for the people there.  Not pretend value.  Not obligatory attendance.  Not rote habit.  Something really valuable.  It doesn’t have to be humongously valuable but it does have to be valuable.  

But they also need an outer dynamic.  Others need to be coming.  A store may be successful for its ten customers and that can be all the success that is needed if those ten sustain the store and the store sustains them.  Eventually, those ten will die and the store will end its successful life unless there are replacement customers.

New customers bring new ideas, new hearts, new hands.  And, get this, there is no straight sequence of we get an inner dynamic going and then we get new customers.  That is partially true but not completely.  New people bring a new inner dynamic and a new inner dynamic brings new people.  Or how do you get a new inner dynamic?  Get new people.  Play the dynamics as both and simultaneously, not as a sequence of first inner development and then outer recruitment.  

Okay, way back to the beginning of this article.  Once people come to a church a first time we have to figure out how to get them back a second time.  Most churches focus on this area but if you don’t focus on getting first time guests, you don’t have anybody to work all the welcome strategies on!  Anyway, if a person comes back a second time, the most powerful -- the one thing -- I think that will bring them back a third time is people knowing their name.  How are you with names?  

Listen when they tell you their name.  Really listen … for that!  Say their name out loud in the conversation with them several times.  Find a silly image or rhyme link to help you remember their name.  When you sit down in the pew write their name on your bulletin.  Save your bulletin and get it out before going to church next week.  

Next week -- how Peachtree leapfrogs the member process.