I’m not quite sure I would call the first church we visited a mega church but I would call it honking huge. When we pulled into the parking lot I needed help fron someone to simply point out what door I needed to be heading for.  I didn’t want to walk in the wrong door and end up getting lost in the church somewhere (it really was that big).  I had parked in the visitors lot, and was finally able to get someone’s attention to point out where I needed to be going. Visiting a church as a parent is drastically different than visiting without a child.  First you have to decide if you want to keep your child with you, and then you have to decide if you trust the nursery workers to keep your child safe.  Well, I was the with my wife and my very young (6 month old) son.  We decided to put him into the nursery during the service since we knew some friends that went there and they seemed to like it all. We left the children’s wing and made our way to one of two sanctuary’s.  We waited for our friends outside the door of one of them, and apparently 400 people had the same idea.  So giving up on finding anyone, we made our way into the sancuary.  We looked for a seat for a few minutes and were then guided by ushers into first available seats.  (In fact the ushers made an entire row of people scoot down so we could sit.)  The service was nice.  We learned later on that the other sanctuary in the building had a closed circuit projector view of the pulpit area, not a live person.  The service seemed very much like a production.  I’ve always enjoyed listening to this particular preacher and enjoyed his serrmon this Sunday, something about Jesus and the stock market.  After service it took a while to pick up our son and get back to our car.  Leaving the parking lot was a nightmare.  We saw two car accidents, and almost got caught in one ourselves.  There were a good number of off duty police officers direcring traffic, so nobody had to wait very long.  We finally got back home and had time to reflect on our morning.

Good

• great use of music, drama, environment 
• a visitor parking lot (that’s just awesome)

Bad

• not able to talk with pastor after service
• had to get greeter’s attention for assistance

Are you kidding me?

• no signs from visitor lot to children’s wing
• no way to distinguish visitors with that many people there, no way to follow up with them

Lessons learned

• visitors are important and need to be treated that way
• signage is very important
• make sure staff is available after service
• make sure greeters are excited about their ministry, much more likely to greet people right off the bat