Pastoral Persuasion

Over break, I had the unique opportunity to watch my Dad do some non-sales selling. For more context, my Dad is a pastor of a church in the South Hills and has experience with ed-med selling, though he doesn’t know it. There is this new family that has recently started attending our church, and they are super awesome. The husband works at Sherwin Williams and was in the EP fraternity, and the wife was a business management major like myself and was a member of the ABT sorority. Needless to say, the conversation was exciting because my sister and I are Grove City students and my parents went to Geneva College, so the rivalry was fun.
After time spent in fellowship and rich conversation (similar to what Michael did when selling at Chili’s), the conversation took a more serious turn toward the reason this family asked us to meet. They were curious about becoming members of our church and wanted to know more about what that process looks like for them and their family. My Dad has been in ministry long enough to be able to read people. When they started down this conversation path I noticed a shift in my Dad’s posture. It was subtle, but I think he was either intentionally or unintentionally using the mimic strategy. He matched the wife’s posture in his chair. In addition, he didn’t answer all of their questions right away, he usually responded by asking more questions and digging for pain. As an observer of this conversation, I was somewhat impressed with my Dad. It was only after a few minutes of further digging that he started to provide answers to the questions they were asking.
By the end of the conversation, from what I observed, everyone seemed to be happy with where they had ended up. We continued to have a very pleasant rest of the afternoon. When the family we were hosting had left, I said to my Dad, “That was pretty textbook non-sales selling there,” he just looked at me confused, and asked me to explain.
My Dad genuinely cares about the sheep of his flock and was not trying to sell our church people, however, he does think that attending church is important and thinks that he can be of help to this family through the ministry he and his staff are trying to provide to the community.