How To Pray For Church Growth

Hey, what's up, y'all? My name is Chris Abbott, but all my friends just call me "Abbo," and in this video, we're going to be breaking this up into two parts. We're going to be talking about exactly how to pray for church growth and exactly what we should ask the Lord, and kind of what that looks like. And then we're also going to talk about a prayer strategy that can actually grow your church. So, let's dive in to how to pray for church growth. Coming up.

Hey, what's up, y'all? Welcome back. If we're meeting for the first time, welcome to the channel. This channel exists to help pastors and church leaders be more effective in ministry, be more effective in social media, and be able to grow their church using technology. So, what we wanted to cover in this video is we specifically want to cover how to pray for church growth, and we also want to give you a step-by-step blueprint on how to use a prayer request strategy to be able to reach new people in your city and grow your church. So, just to give you an idea, this has actually helped a church of 15 people grow to 50 in only two months; helped a church of 60 grow to 110 in three months; and a church of 130 go to 200 in only three months. So, let's dive in and let's talk about some of the scriptures that we can pray when we're praying for church growth.

Alright, so first one, and one of my favorite scriptures of all time, is John 14:13 and 14. It says, "You can ask for anything in my name and I'll do it, so that the Son can bring glory to the Father. Yes, ask me anything in my name and I'll do it." So, I love this because I think this is kind of like a blank check to be able to pray for anything we want, but it has some conditions; say, that we can ask for anything in his name. So, in his name is just a condition, basically meaning according to his will. Now, how do we know what his will is? How do we know that he wants us to grow the church? Well, we know because of the Great Commission, and we know because of Luke 14:23 that says, "Go out to the highways and hedges and compel them to come in, that my house may be full."

Alright, let's take a look at another one: Matthew 7:7-8: "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." And finally, another one of my favorite scriptures: Mark 11:24: "For this reason I tell you, whatever you pray and ask for, believe that you received it, and it'll be yours." Man, these scriptures—we know that we can ask for whatever we want in Jesus' name as long as it lines up with the will of God, and that he'll give it to us.

So, my guess is if you're watching this video, you've probably been praying for church growth. Maybe it's been working, maybe it hasn't. So let me share with you a story of a Honduran pastor of a 60,000-member church and the prayer that he prayed that finally kicked off his church growth. So he tells the story of when he was running about 500 people; they would do everything that they could to try to grow. So they would knock on doors, they would do advertising, they would do direct mail, and they'd grow. They'd go from 500 to 600, 700, 800, and then something happened and they go back down to 500. So then they'd advertise again, they knock on more doors, they do an invite campaign, they grow, and then they go back to 500. So finally that pastor got on his knees and just said, "God, here's the deal, there are pastors that you have called to pastor 500-member churches, but I'm not one of them. You've called me to reach this nation," and he said, that was the point when he prayed that prayer and he just asked God to help him breakthrough and just said, "Man, this is it. There are plenty of pastors that you've called to pastor 500-member churches, but I'm not one of them. You have called me to reach this nation," and when he finally drew that line in the sand and he prayed that prayer, his church began to grow and they went from 500 to over 60,000 members, and he attributes everything to that prayer.

Alright, so before I dive into the four-part step-by-step blueprint on how you can use a prayer request strategy in order to grow your church, make sure to subscribe to this channel. If you're brand new, we put out brand new videos every single day, five days a week; we're constantly coming out with fresh content. So make sure to hit that subscribe button and hit that little bell notification that way you get notified every single time we drop a new video.

Alright, so one of the fastest-growing churches in the 90s did something completely revolutionary; something I've personally never heard of, and I don't think anyone ever had at the time either. So what the pastor did, because he was kind of, you know, straight off the streets, and if you ask him he says, man, I just didn't know any better, is instead of printing up like a bunch of invitations and going out witnessing to people and inviting them to church or putting up a billboard or posters, what he would do is he would literally just walk down the street to the gas station by his church and he would just pray for people on Friday and Saturday nights. So, imagine this: he literally would just walk up—somebody pulls into the gas station—he would immediately just start pumping their gas, and while he was pumping their gas he'd just say, "Hey man, how can I pray for you?" It's like, the gas station attendant guy—want to pray for me? It's like, "I don't know, man, my marriage kind of sucks." "Alright, it's like, okay, great, let's pray for your marriage."

Alright, so what happened is he was literally praying for like 2 or 3 hundred people every single Friday and Saturday night, and then some of them would say, "Hey man, why are you doing this? Like, do you work for the gas station?" He said, "Oh no, I pastor the church right down the street," and so obviously, some of them would say, "Well, what time is church on Sunday?" So, here's the deal: when you pray for that many people every single week, some of them are going to come to church on Sunday. So, that's exactly what happened; just the natural overflow of doing ministry at that scale is that some of those people end up coming to church on Sunday, and when you're praying for so many people every single weekend, the natural overflow is that some of them are going to come to church, and that's exactly what happened. He ended up having one of the fastest-growing churches in the nation. He got featured on MTV and in Rolling Stone magazine, and so the church absolutely took off. So I call this the gas station principle. Here's what I love about this and here's why I think this actually worked and what makes this different than everything else. So, what everybody else does is they invite people to church so they can do ministry, and this makes sense. I did this myself for years. Where it's like, hey, if we can just get them in the doors, then man, we can do ministry. Like, we get them saved, get them baptized, plugged into a small group or a serve team. But we invite people to church so we can do ministry. What he did is he flipped that and he did ministry first and then invited people to church, and that's what made all the difference. So, basically, he broke all the rules of church growth, and that's why it worked. He did ministry first and then he invited people to church.

So, what does that look like nowadays? Because that worked in 1992, but nowadays if you go out to your local gas station and try to lay hands on people and pray for them, they're probably gonna call the cops on you. So, the best way to do this is actually to use social media and technology. So I'm going to walk you through a four-part framework that churches all over the country have been using in order to use this gas station principle, this ministry-first principle, in order to grow their church. So I actually know of a church of 50 people that used this exact strategy and got 71 new families to sign up and plan a visit to their church in only two months. So, let's dive into the four-part framework.

Alright, step number one is you're going to create a Facebook ad. Alright, this is a targeted Facebook ad; this is not a boosted post. We're going to create a Facebook ad by going to facebook.com/adsmanager, and you're going to want to pick the Messages objective. Alright, so what we want to do—they have a lot of different objectives there; if you've ever run a Facebook ad, you know what I'm talking about—you want to pick a Messages objective because what we want to do is we want to create a Facebook ad that says, "Hey Tulsa, how can I pray for you?" and then we're going to run them into Facebook Messenger. That's going to tell Facebook's algorithm to optimize our ad to get the most amount of prayer requests or messages possible and send them into Facebook Messenger. So this way we're not actually taking them to our website or to our home page or even a landing page; we're taking people from a Facebook ad into Facebook Messenger.

So, step two is you want to set up a chatbot in order to be able to handle all those prayer requests that are coming into Messenger. Now, if you're not familiar with the chatbot, listen. I get it; it's kind of a weird word, it sounds intimidating. But really all it is is you're gonna write out predetermined responses to questions or answers that people have that they would write inside of Facebook Messenger. So you can do this by going to manychat.com. You can actually click on the link in the description below; we have a link where you can set up a free account, and they have some really simple tutorials. You can have a chatbot up and running in about an hour. This is something that I personally believe that chatbots are the future. This is kind of like websites back in like 1999 and 2000 where it was brand new, not everybody had them, not everybody really knew what it was or why they needed one. But the innovative people knew, hey, this is the future; we need to figure it out. I'm telling you that is chatbots right now; chatbots are going to be the future, and moving forward, not too long from now, every single church is going to have a chatbot. So, it makes sense to just take the time, go spend about an hour to kind of learning chatbots so you can continue to use this incredible ministry tool for the next several years. All your chatbot is gonna do is gonna be able to respond to people once they submit their prayer requests through Facebook Messenger. So if John reaches out and says, "Hey, Pastor Chris, man, 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," say, okay, great. So that chatbot is going to collect that request and then it's going to send a predetermined response that you've already pre-written. So it might say something like, "Hey John, thank you so much for trusting with your prayer requests. I promise to be praying for you this week," and then you just want to invite them to church. I like leading them into plan your visit where they can actually have a chance to schedule an appointment to visit the church.

Step number three is that you're gonna send an audio prayer to every single prayer request that came in. So some people are gonna go ahead and plan a visit through the chatbot that you set up, but some people aren't, and so what you want to do is, regardless of whether or not they plan to visit, all you want to do is you want to send them an audio prayer, and this is really simple. There's basically three parts to this audio prayer; I call it the three-part conversation elevation framework. All you want to do is you want to introduce yourself, pray for him, and then end it with a question. So when you send an audio file on Facebook, you only have 60 seconds, so it's not going to take a lot of time. If you have three prayer requests a day, this is only going to take you about three minutes a day, and you can actually batch them. You can do it at the same time, like at the end of the day before you go to bed, pick up your phone, send these audio prayers, however you want to do it. But by sending this audio prayer, they're hearing your voice, using their name, praying for their situation. So the reason we call it conversation elevation is it takes this kind of online anonymous conversation that you guys are having and it elevates it to a personal connection. So before, like, they're sending you their prayer requests, you don't know them, they don't know you. But all of a sudden they get an audio prayer; they hear your voice using their name, praying for their situation, and it elevates it to a personal connection, and then we're gonna end that audio prayer with an invite to church. So, introduction, prayer, question; super simple, and now when we raise this up to a personal connection and then we invite them to church, now we're tapping into the power of a personal invite. So when you do this, you'll actually double the amount of visitors that you have on Sunday morning simply by sending the audio prayer and ending it with a question.

Alright, and then finally, step number four: you want to plug them into some type of a follow-up system. Now I am a huge fan of Text in Church. If you're not using Text to Church right now, you want to try it out. We actually have a link down in the description below. I actually talked to Tyler over at Text in Church, and we actually secured a discount for you guys so you can actually try it 90 days absolutely free to see if you like it—try it before you buy it. I don't work for Text in Church; I'm just a huge fan. So, you can check that out, and here's the cool thing: if you have no idea how to set up like an extended follow-up system, they actually have a six-week follow-up system that's already built. That literally, when you sign up, you can just import that into your account and automatically start uploading all of the information from your connect cards on Sunday into your Text in Church account on Monday, and it'll automatically kick off a completely automated six-week follow-up system; pretty cool. So if you like this video and you like the system that we just laid out for you—I literally just told you exactly what to do step by step—but you're just saying, "Chris, that sounds awesome. But man, I don't have time to go set that up myself, or I just don't want to learn another thing," if that sounds like you, then go over to churchgrowthagency.com or click on the link in the description below; we'd be happy to jump on a call and talk about what it would be like to actually set this up for you. So hope you're having a phenomenal day. We'll see you soon.