I vividly remember walking up the front steps to the door of the Kansas City church where I was to interview for my first pastorate. Nothing but a door stood between my 28-year-old eagerness and a group of people with whom I’d soon fall in love and spend the next eight years working for Jesus. The windowless door was a thick oak slab hung with gigantic hinges and original hardware. The cornerstone beside it read 1928. I grabbed the handle, thumb-pressed the latch, and pulled. The door didn’t budge. I decided I must be at the wrong entrance. But I yanked harder a second time and it opened, almost knocking me over.
I don’t recall any details of the interview, though that was the day I realized that every guest’s first encounter with a church building starts with the door handle. If the door and handle aren’t welcoming, it may be a sign that the practice of hospitality inside is out of whack as well. Those doors were a pain. They swelled after every rain. Our first capital campaign had four new entry doors at the top of the project list.
Over the years, my sense of church doors as hospitality devices morphed into a metaphorical understanding of them as indicators of opportunity. The more doors a church has, I like to say, the higher the odds that its ministry is vibrant. I don’t mean physical doors of wood, metal, and glass. I have in mind multiple access points by which people enter into the life of a church in varied and meaningful ways.
