c. 2007 Religion News Service

AMES, Iowa _ I like hotels.

Whether it’s Manhattan vertical or roadside horizontal, I enjoy checking into a new room and discovering amenities, such as ample lighting, high-speed Internet access, coffee makers, even those little shampoo bottles.

These amenities suggest they know what I need and have taken steps to provide. They have studied travelers _ not with an eye to exploiting us, as often happens in commerce, but serving us.

It’s smart business. A satisfied guest is likely to return.

Why don’t more enterprises figure this out? Study their constituents, identify reasonable ways to serve their needs, and make the small efforts that encourage repeat business _ it’s not that complicated.

Why don’t more businesses do this? I think it shows a fundamental disregard for customers. Businesses spend more on advertising than on customer service. They decide what they want to sell, rather than being curious about what people want to buy. They enable prickly staff, use arcane language and impose surprise costs that suggest every detail is a sham.

When customers go elsewhere, they blame customers for being ungrateful or unknowing. Instead of learning from the experience of losing a customer, they chase another round of first-time customers.

I can think of many offenders. Car dealers, for example, routinely turn the car-buying dream into a nightmare of feeling high-pressured and hoodwinked. Department stores hide their salesclerks and fill their aisles with irritating kiosks. Many government agencies treat constituents as an annoyance to be endured.

And then there are churches, which are my particular concern. In my experience, the dividing line between successful and unsuccessful churches has little to do with doctrine, attitudes toward Scripture, facilities, quality of clergy or music, or even location. It has to do with “customer service.”

Healthy churches have studied their constituents, identified their needs, listened to their questions, and anticipated their evolving interests. Having studied, they act.

Restrooms are visible and clean. Classrooms are friendly and safe. Greetings are warm, music is rewarding, preaching is relevant, liturgy has no secret handshakes, activities are pertinent, information is readily available _ and the message is consistent: We respect who you are.

Unhealthy churches do exactly the opposite. They ignore visitors. They maneuver regulars into cliques. Music ministers see themselves as defending musical orthodoxy, not serving worshippers. Preachers focus on whatever church controversy has emerged as a substitute for serious work. Activities seem out-of-touch, secrecy abounds, change is regarded as an affront and staff are meeting-attenders, not pastors. The message is consistent: We do what we want to do and don’t care who you are.

Yes, it takes work to understand people’s needs and to respond to them. But it doesn’t take that much work. A customer-service orientation isn’t difficult to envision or to execute.

The obstacle is the orientation itself. It’s the problem Jesus identified when he talked about the need to die to self, to give life away, to be generous and to love. For all of their pious talk about “biblical truth” and “apostolic tradition,” churches that storm about doctrine and tradition are saying that people and their needs don’t matter.

So are churches that take inordinate pride in never changing from former ways, as if today’s hungry should be grateful for stale bread. So are churches that drift along as if keeping the doors open were sufficient.

People aren’t stupid. They get the message. And so they go elsewhere.

Where do they go? Some go to brunch, but most seem to be finding churches that pay attention to “customer service.”

(Tom Ehrich is a writer, consultant and leader of workshops. His book, “Just Wondering, Jesus: 100 Questions People Want to Ask,” was published by Morehouse Publishing. An Episcopal priest, he lives in Durham, N.C. His Web site is http://www.onajourney.org.)

KRE/PH END EHRICH

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