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Bulletin 143 Date : 22nd Sep 2008
Putting the Customer First

Saturday Morning has become Photo Marathon morning for me lately. This Hope 08 outreach event is looming and I make a customary early morning trip to the PO Box to pick up bookings followed by a trip to the bank to pay them in. This Saturday, both trips opened my eyes.

The PO Box exists in the form of a complex on Incinerator Road (an apt name considering all the junk mail we get these days). There is a bell on the outside wall which needs to be pressed before entering the office in order to alert the staff to your arrival. Sadly this is blocked by a security door and so I had to resort to shouting and banging on the counter loudly to arouse attention from the many people sitting in the back offices doing other jobs and listening to loud, mind-numbing music. Eventually a rather grumpy man emerged, none too pleased by the manner in which I had attracted attention and, instead of greeting me, complained about the lack of staff on the desk.

Then came the trip to the bank (which I won’t name and shame in the present unstable economic climate lest it crashes). Being Saturday morning, there was no one on the counter. Instead customers had to use machines to pay into their accounts. As I sought assistance from a bank employee, another customer was complaining bitterly that there were no instructions on the wall to explain what to do. Instead she had to do battle with on-screen instructions which disappeared before she had managed to digest them and left her unable to complete her transaction before the machine impatiently closed itself down leaving her embarrassed and frustrated. When I presented my transaction to the bank employee, he said that the machine couldn’t handle it because it was ‘an odd amount’. What’s odd about £27.50 is beyond me but there it is.

Both incidents left me pondering just how unimportant the customer has become in today’s society and how impersonal life is. I also pondered how well the churches do in terms of ‘putting the customer first’. William Temple, a former Archbishop of Canterbury once famously said, “The Church is the only organisation which exists for the benefit of non-members”. But how much of what we do is inward-focused or self-serving and hinders the mission priority of reaching out to non-believers? As John Wesley once said, “We have nothing to do but to save souls.” Now, before you pull me up on this, I agree that it’s no good evangelising if you don’t have a strong faith community to bring people into and so we have a dual responsibility of building up the church into a vibrant worshipping community of faith AND reaching out to others so that they may become part of this. Both are equally important and need to be held in balance. Jesus’ final words to his disciples are recorded in Matthew 28:16-20 as ‘The Great Commission’ which I’m sure I don’t need to remind you of.

I sometimes share with churches my own views on what makes a good evangelist and the definition I often quote is “someone who doesn’t know they are doing it”. For me the most effective evangelists are people who simply exude the love of Christ without thinking because their life is a glowing testament to his grace. That means that all Christians, irrespective of training, academic ability, or having ‘the gift of the gab’ can be evangelists. Surely the churches should be full of people like this. I wish the Post Office and the un-named bank were similarly staffed!

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