The other day my wife and I went out to breakfast at a local I-Hop. She had the day off and I had a craving for waffles for some strange reason. When you head out to a place that specializes in a particular thing—like breakfast—you tend to build up certain expectations for what you’re going to get. We got our booth, my wife ordered her pancakes, I ordered my waffles and we settled in to wait for our orders. I finished off my glass of orange juice and poured myself a cup of coffee from the plastic faux-bronze personal-sized pitcher. It was the worst coffee I’ve ever tasted.
No, I take that back. I can remember a time when I drank a worse cup of coffee. During a trip to the Middle East we were hosted by a group of very hospitable Bedouins. Sitting outside their tent, amid goats, sand and sun we were served cups of “Bedouin coffee” (as our guide called it, though I’ve had similar, less toxic, types of “Arabian” or “Turkish” coffee). I’m not sure what I drank, but it wasn’t coffee. Hot, thick, inky, strong, boiled, bitter, and gritty (the bottom third of the cup consisted of what seemed coffee grounds infused sand. I’m not making this up.). My first sip choked off my windpipe and shriveled my sinuses to raisins. The only good thing about the drink was that it was served in small portions (in a demitasse, like Cuban coffee). I would have stuck my face in the desert sand and rinsed my throat with it if I weren’t so afraid it would insult my hosts.
I-Hop’s coffee wasn’t as bad, but it was no improvement. Especially when one expects that a place dedicated to serving breakfast would know how to brew a decent cup of coffee. Heck, on most days, a cup of coffee IS my breakfast. I asked our overly-friendly waitress (who insisted on calling me “Honey,” a term of endearment not even my wife uses on me) for another pot. Feeling the outside of the pot she asked if it wasn’t hot enough. I responded that it was hot enough, it was just a bad batch of coffee.
She cheerfully bought another pot, pouring a cup and saying, “Here you go, Honey,” before flying off to take another table’s order. But that second batch of coffee (here I’m naively assuming that it was a different batch) was just as bad. Weak, watery, bitter and tasting more like brewed coffee grounds than brewed coffee. I gave up on it, but wondered about the business side of it, saying to my wife, “You would think that a business whose business is breakfast would be intentional about serving a good cup of coffee.”
I started thinking about the expectations people have about the places they go. I wondered about what expectations people have about what they’ll get at a congregation, and what they may actually get when they show up. As someone who visits congregations as part of my work I’ve certainly been in many where my experience fell short of expectations—even as an experienced lifelong churchgoer who has no illusions that congregations are a human enterprise rather than a divine phenomenon.
So, what expectations do people have when visiting a congregation? I’m hesitant to guess—the motivations for why people go to church are likely as varied as the individuals who attend. But my hunch is that when people go to church, they have certain expectations. I think that even the non-churched who walk into your church on a Sunday morning for the first time come with certain expectations. And my hunch is that those expectations have more to do with personal human needs than with matters of taste or style. But I think people have reasonable expectations about:
- hospitality
- comfort and security (including cleanliness of facilities)
- aesthetics
- relevance
- quality
- experience of the Holy
- inspiration.
Here are four questions to consider about expectations and your congregation:
- What expectations do you think your church members have?
- Have they given up on their expectation and “settled” for what they get?
- What specific expectations do you thing non-churched visitors to your church have?
- How well do you think your congregation meets people’s expectations about what they’ve come to church seeking?
I’ll likely not return to I-Hop anytime soon. The next time my wife and I go out to breakfast it will be somewhere else where I’ll hope for a good cup of coffee. And I have a hunch that even if the coffee is only a little better I’ll be thinking, “Well, at least it’s better than that other place.” Will visitors to your church leave thinking about what other church they’ll try next because of unmet expectations?
