To Welcome or Not To Welcome?

Unlike one or two of his predecessors, if there were celebrities in the congregation he neither knew nor cared. He was there to worship God and never raised his eyes from his hymn book. The idea that the minister should smile benignly at the people, or make them "feel welcome" with some words of social greeting, was foreign to his whole conception of the grandeur of Christian Worship. If the church were the minister's home and the people his guests, then, he argued, it would be permissible to say, 'Good morning folks; nice to see you, how good of you to come,' but he regarded that whole approach as wrong; 'It is not our service; the people do not come there to see us or please us...They, and we, are there to worship God, and to meet with God. A minister in a church is not like a man inviting people into his home; he is not in charge here. He is just a servant himself.'

Taken from 

D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, The Fight of Faith, 1939-1981

Iain H. Murray, p. 254