Photo and Commentary ©2025 by Maylan Schurch
Sabbath and Sunday, October 11 and 12, 2025
As October crawls along, Halloween decorations are beginning to sprout on our neighborhood properties. This giant half-buried skeleton is making its second-year-in-a-row appearance on this lawn, along with a number of face-carved pumpkins and a few scattered small fence segments containing skull carvings.
I couldn’t help grinning at the vertical “Welcome” banner beside the door. Its message has been truncated to “Welc–,” and what with all the preliminary intimidation, once wonders how welcome a guest might feel.
Halloween décor is all in good fun, of course, but it got me to remembering – as someone who’s been a church pastor for 43 years – how important it is to make people feel welcome. In a church, it starts with a friendly team of greeters in the foyer. It continues in the Bible class discussion, and into the sermon, and back out into the foyer again, and on potluck Sabbaths it continues there as well.
That means that anyone – not just leaders or teachers or greeters – needs to be ready to say “welcome” in as many ways as possible. The Bible tells us how, in the verses at each of the links below:
https://www.bibleinfo.com/en/topics/hospitality