Transcription
Hey, what's up, y'all? Welcome back. In this video, we're going to be answering the question: Why must we pray for church growth? I'm going to show you how a church of 50 people used prayer to get 71 new families to sign up and schedule a visit to their church. Coming up.
Hey, what's up, y'all? My name is Chris Abbott, and if we're meeting for the first time, I have helped thousands of churches attract thousands of new visitors. One of the ways that we do that is with ministry-based social media campaigns, and my favorite ministry-based campaign to use is a prayer campaign. So, in this video, we're going to outline the step-by-step method that we actually use for all of our partner churches on how to set up a prayer campaign, and we'll show you exactly how you can do it at your church.
Okay, so, why must we pray for church growth? Now, I'm gonna assume that your church is already praying. If you have a great church and you have been trying to grow your church, then I'm sure you have been praying the lights out. But I would encourage you to keep going, especially if you've been praying and it feels like nothing's happening. A lot of times what's happening is the Holy Spirit is actively working on your behalf behind the scenes. So, don't grow weary; keep going; keep praying. Matthew 7:7-8 says, "Ask and it'll be given to you; seek and you shall find; knock and the door will be opened. For everyone who asks receives; everyone who seeks finds; and to everyone who knocks, the door will be opened." So don't grow weary in doing good. Keep pressing on, keep praying, and let's talk about a couple of different ways that we can actually use prayer to connect with people in our city and grow our church.
Okay, so, now that you are laying the foundation for church growth because you are personally in prayer and probably corporately in prayer as well, the next thing that you want to do is you're going to set up a Facebook ad. Now, this is not a boosted post. You actually want to go to Facebook.com/adsmanager and you want to set up a targeted Facebook ad that runs people from Facebook into Facebook Messenger. So, you don't want to send them to your website or to a landing page. You actually want to keep people on Facebook, and you want to take them from Facebook into Facebook Messenger, and you want to create a Facebook ad that simply says, "How can I pray for you?" Now, you're going to have a bunch of different choices on what type of ad to set up whenever you create your ad. So, I recommend creating a messages ad. This is going to tell Facebook's algorithm to optimize and tweak your ad to get as many people as possible who are going to send you messages inside of Facebook Messenger.
Alright, step number two: Facebook Messenger. So after you've created your ad that simply says, "How can I pray for you," and you're running it to everyone within driving distance of your church, now you want to send them into Facebook Messenger where you can actually have a conversation about their prayer request, and so you can actually do this one of two ways. The first way is you can actually do it manually. So this is where people are clicking on your ad, they're going into Facebook Messenger and actually writing their prayer request to you, and then you can actually write back and forth. You can have a ministry conversation inside of Messenger, and you can just do everything manually. The second option is that you can actually set up a chatbot, which is just a series of automated responses to be able to facilitate that conversation with people as they're submitting their prayer requests, and you can even set this up so that it will store the prayer request in the system, and then you can jump in and still have a personal interaction. But at least this way you're using some automated sequences to help you field some of the responses. Again, it's totally up to you. If chatbots seem confusing and super intimidating, don't even worry about it. Just run a Facebook ad into Messenger and do everything manually.
Alright, so before I get to my last two points, if you like this video, make sure to like and subscribe because we have brand new content and new videos dropping every single day, and we're going to continue to be talking about prayer, social media, leadership, and church growth.
Alright, step three: the audio prayer. This part is really important because now we're gonna take this from an online anonymous conversation to a personal connection. So, I actually call this conversation elevation. I'm gonna give you my three-part framework for conversation elevation. It simply looks like this: When you're having a conversation with someone in Messenger and you're promising to pray for them, it's just an online anonymous conversation, but then when they get an audio prayer from you and they hear your voice, using their name, praying for their situation, it elevates that conversation from an online anonymous conversation to a personal connection. So now, they feel like they know you, they trust you, and they understand you as a person, and so this is really key in building relationship equity, and now we can tap into the power of a personal invite. So, Facebook will only let you send a 59-second audio. So, you have to pray pretty quick, and you want to use this three-part strategy. Number one, you want to introduce yourself. Number two, you want to pray for him, and number three, end it with a question. So introduction, prayer, question. So go something like this: Let's say that John reaches out and submits a prayer request and says, "Hey, my wife Susie is having surgery next week, and we're just a little bit nervous about it. So, if you could pray for her, that'd be awesome." So inside of Messenger, you'll say, "Hey John, thank you so much for trusting me. Yes, I'll absolutely be praying for," and then you want to send an audio prayer, and you can do this through Facebook's Business Suite app. It's really simple, that is introducing yourself, praying for him, and then ending it with a question. So you might say, "Hey, what's up John? This is Pastor Chris. Hey, I saw your prayer request, and man I just wanted to take a second to pray for you personally. So let's pray, Dear God, I pray for John and I pray for his wife Susie and her upcoming surgery next week. God, I pray for the doctors and the surgeons that will be performing the surgery." Go through your entire prayer, and then you say, "In Jesus' name, amen," and then end it with a question. Say, "John, I tell you what, we're actually having church this Sunday. Would you like to come out so that I can pray for you in person?" Now we've done this with churches all over the country, and we typically see about 10% of the people who submit a prayer request will then go on to say, "Yes, I do want to come to church." So by the time you send a hundred audio prayers, you'll probably have about 10 people who have committed to coming to church. Okay, so that's the three-part conversation elevation framework: Introduce yourself, pray for him, end it with a question.
Alright, and finally, step four: plan your visit. Now, when you are sending over the audio prayer and you're inviting people out to church, if they say yes, what I recommend is using Plan Your Visit, and in this case, all we're going to be doing is getting their name, email, and phone number so that you can have a friendly person waiting for them at the front door, help them get their kids checked into kids' church, give them a tour of the building, maybe introduce them to some key staff and leaders, and then sit with them in service. Now, not everybody's gonna want this, but what we found is that the majority of people do because it's kind of like that lost kid in the cafeteria syndrome. You show up on the first day of high school and you walk into the cafeteria and you don't see anyone you know; you freak out. You feel like everyone's staring at you. So you just sit at the very first table when you first walked in, and now you're sitting by yourself at lunch like a loser. That's exactly how a lot of first-time visitors feel, and so we want to lower the barrier of entry for guests to visit for the very first time, and one of the easiest ways to do that is with Plan Your Visit. Just simply have a friendly person waiting for them at the front door to show them around, sit with them in service, and help them feel comfortable during their first visit.
Okay, so I just outlined for you the exact strategy that we have been using with all of our partner churches. In fact, we had a church of only 50 people that used this exact strategy, and they were able to generate over 500 prayer requests and 71 new families that plan to visit their church in only two months. So it doesn't matter if you have a big church, a small church, a big budget, a small budget, or what part of the country that you live in. This works because this is human to human, and every single person wants a pastor praying for them.
Alright, so if you like this video and you want to learn more practical ways about how to use Facebook and Instagram and technology to grow your church, then click on the link in the description below and check out my brand new series, How to Use Social Media for Church Growth. Well, see you soon.