The Open Church: The Presence

I grew up in a small town where most of the community around us was Catholic. And they had ideas about what happened at our church — the one my parents took me to every Sunday. Some of those ideas were wrong. Most of them were just the natural result of not knowing anyone inside.

What I remember is that it didn’t matter much, because the church was growing anyway.

Not because of a campaign or a sign or anything deliberate. Because the people there were animados — that’s the word that comes to mind, the Spanish one, because English doesn’t quite capture it. Animated. Lit up. Genuinely excited to be at that church, genuinely glad to meet someone new, genuinely interested in bringing people into what they had found. It was a different era. People still read the church directory. They drove past a building on a Sunday morning and heard something and pulled over. They stopped in because a neighbor had mentioned it once, months ago, and they finally got curious enough.

The preconceived notions were real. But the people were even more real.

That’s the thing about presence that no strategy can fully account for. You can optimize everything — the timing, the message, the channels — and still produce nothing if the people inside aren’t genuinely glad to be there. And you can have almost nothing working in your favor and still grow if the congregation carries something contagious.

The churches that become a real presence in their communities aren’t usually the ones with the best outreach programs. They’re the ones where the people inside have something they can’t stop talking about, and the community around them can feel it.

What’s changed since then is not human nature. People still respond to warmth. They still follow an invitation from someone who clearly means it. They still walk through doors that feel open rather than doors that feel managed.

What’s changed is that presence has gotten harder to stumble into. People don’t drive by and stop in anymore. The directory is gone. The front porch culture that made a small town feel navigable has thinned out, and the natural friction between a church and its surrounding community has grown.

So the question is how a congregation becomes a presence in an environment that doesn’t create those moments automatically. The answer hasn’t changed that much: you show up where people already are, not as an institution with an agenda, but as neighbors. A few people at a community event not because the church sent them but because they live there. Showing up at the school, the market, the block that flooded last spring. Being known before you’re needed.

It doesn’t scale the way a campaign does. But it produces the thing a campaign can’t — a community that thinks of your church when something happens, because your people were already there when nothing was.

The preconceived notions don’t go away on their own. What goes away is their power, when the people inside a church are present enough, warm enough, real enough that the notions stop mattering.

That was true in a small town in a different era. It’s still true now. The animados were the strategy. They just didn’t know it.

Next in the series: The Invitation — the most powerful outreach a church has is already sitting in the seats.

Richard Alvarez is the founder of Grow Congregations, a church growth platform built for churches that are ready to be found.