How welcome are people in your church?

I saw the following post at ginkworld and it made me kind of ill.

come on in?

recently, tina and i had an opportunity to visit a very interesting church. it is one of those "mega-churches." now, i am not going to share the name of the church because the name does not matter. my desire is not to embarrass the church, nor is it to make this about them - it is about us, it is about something very interesting. take a look at the picture on the right and tell me what is missing? take a good look and think about what is not shown. go on, take a good look.

give up?

the answer is, there are no handles on the doors.

that's right, the church has no handles on the doors leading into any part of the church. the only way into the church is to have a key, or be let in by someone who is in the building. no one is able to just "walk in," and you can never just "visit" without being allowed in. [in fact, to "visit" the church requires that you stop by the security office, sign in and get a visitors pass] when we pointed this out to some of the people who attend the church they had some very interesting responses -

one women said, "well we do have a great deal of homeless people in the area and they are always coming by for help. so we had the doors replaced so they could not just walk in." well, God forbid a homeless person should ever approach a church for help; i mean what are they thinking? do they actually think we care? do they actually think we are to welcome "those" people into our clean, well kept, over priced church? after all, they did not have anything to do with the building of the church.

one women said, "oh, how funny, i never noticed that before." then just walked away laughing with here friends at how funny it was that the church had no door handles. yea, it is so funny that a place that calls itself "God's House" should put locks on the doors so people could not get in. i wonder, what would happen if she got to the gates of heaven and found that the handles had been removed? do you think she would be laughing at that point?

as we started to ask more about the reasoning, what we found was very interesting. there were two sides,and both seemed very close. many of those inside the church, members, never gave the doors a second thought. to them, it was the norm; that is the way the church was and they liked it. they saw it as a way of protecting themselves, and keeping the church as they liked it.

the most surprising thing came from people outside the church. you see, they felt the exact same way. they saw the doors as a norm for what that church was all about. they felt the church was more of an exclusive club more then it was a church. they did not feel offended by the church not having handles. as one person put it, "why would we want to go into a place that wants nothing to do with us."

to me, a church without door handles is a church that reflects the church of our day. there was a time when the church was a place people could go and walk in anytime - today, one needs an appointment to speak with a pastor and a invite to get in the door. the part that concerns me the most is that the american church just does not see how closed it can be - even when you see a church door with no handles.

I'm assuming most of our churches haven't actually removed the door handles (perhaps I'm naive), but my question is... could removing the handles be a metaphor for other ways we try to keep people out? I'm not just speaking of the homeless either - are there other types of people we would just as soon not have in our churches? Are there other ways we use to try to keep them out, or keep them 'in their place'?

My church used to put chains across the parking lot so no one could come on our property other than Sunday morning (we stopped this many years ago). I recently suggested to our church council that we needed to address some problems we were having with our Sunday morning greeters - and no one had a clue what I was talking about (and these are really, really good people... they 'just didn't think about it.').

Any thoughts or ideas from anyone else?