CP & Evangelism - Session 2

today's session is entitled starting right now you may be thinking to yourself didn't we start with Session One well in a sense we did but the reality is session one was about helping you understand why evangelism and church planning are so important now that we've established that fact we're going to start learning about how to do evangelism and church planning starting right so here are three things we're going to cover today number one course overview we're going to see where we are going number two mile poost this is a tool we're going to see it's

a very simple tool we're going to see how it can help you in planning for a church plan or any other major decision you need to do in life and then number three is going to be our main content for today prayer prayer isn't only the first thing in church planning it's the most important thing that you will do your team your partners and you what you can do in a church plant so let's get right into it first of all the course overview in session one we had the unit called compelled to multiply we

study biblical principles and the present day need for evangelism and church planning in today's session session two it's called starting right we're going to be introducing the concept of M poost in church planning as you said we're going to be talking about prayer and some practical tips about how to make this a part of your church planning plan in session three it's called as you go this title comes from Matthew 28:19 which literally translates As You Go Make Disciples we're going to learn clear and personal ways to share the gospel with others and make new

disciples so session four who's there this class will give you a stepbystep process to execute or study your community in order to engage with the gospel more effectively sessions five and six we're calling anybody home and what we mean by that is who's out there that we're trying to reach we're going to have two sessions that talk about developing a concer comprehensive plan to engage your community this answers the question of how do you let them know that you are even ex you even exist often we have church plants that are phenomenal but their Community

doesn't really know they're there so how how do we help overcome that studies have ALS shown and and what we're going to look at session four the Studies have shown that identifying the right Church planner is the key the main thing that we can measure towards having a fruitful Church Plant clearly it's what God is doing is the most important thing but finding Reverend Wright as we call us helps it to know who it is that's supposed to be planting that church in session eight we're going to cover Better Together that explores the the importance

of biblical partnership Church plants that plant with a team are on average much more successful and have a greater chance of surviving than a church planning couple that goes out on their own so what does it mean to plant together in the next session we're going to look at Growing Up full and what that is that comes from Ephesians 413 where it talks about the purpose of the church we're all given different gifts but those gifts aren't for our own edification there're to build one another up until the fullness of Christ so what it means

to be full is to be full in Christ in sessions 10 and 11 we're going to talk about join him uh we talked about Henry blackaby in the first session well Henry blackaby has a phrase that he made very popular God is at work join him we're going to talk about the importance of Partnerships to church planning those Partnerships are going to be with individuals churches networks businesses other entities how do we find those Partners how do we connect with them what are the expectations for our partners and what are the expectations for us we're

going to do two sessions on that and then in the final session we're going to do what we call a symbol it's a homage to uh the you know the superhero universe is you know ass symol we're going to do that but not we're not going to assemble people in this what we're going to do is we're going to assemble our plan we're going to put our plan plan together for a church plant now I want to be very clear when you finish this course you are not going to know everything it takes to plan

a church we don't have enough time to cover all that but you're going to be a lot closer to understanding how to be a church planner where to start if you want to be a church planner or if you want to join a church planning team I've been at this church planning thing for a long time as I told you before and I'm still learning but this course is designed to help you learn how to start sharing your faith if you're not already doing it how to get better if you are doing it and then

how to utilize that in Kingdom expansion by being a part of a church planning team or effort so that's that's our course for the year for this term now we're going to get into something we call mile poost this second thing we're going to learn today so mile poost having mile poost is a very basic concept and it and here's a key phrase this will be on your quiz so listen carefully there's a saying we have in church planting and the church planting is this church planting is mile poost driven not timeline driven so here's

what we mean by that we don't just want to say it on a date and say we're going to start the new church here and there we're going to do this what we want to do is we want to set mile poost that we need to meet that let us know once we've accomplished those mile poost we can now move on to the next step in the strategy the next step in the planting so we're going to help you understand how to use that you may say well I'm trying to learn about church planning but

I'm I'm not really going to plan a church myself well first of all don't tell God what you're going to do or not going to do that never works out but let's say you don't plan a church plant this process can be very helpful to you in planning anything major that you want to com you want to accomplish in life so in planning a mile poost what you're trying to do is determine significant points or events that are important to the progress of your project in this case planning a church it's you are signifying a

measurable stage of development something that you can you can put on a to-do list you can put on a checklist and you can check it off that it's done and so what we're trying to do is do that in a fluid process by doing mile poost that we can move around if you're traveling down the road you may know mile poost or mile markers or Milestones on the side of a road it lets you know how far you've gone uh I can tell by looking at a mile poost how far I have to get home

well that's the same kind of thing in planning for a church plant how do you determine how far you have to get to the next step or the next stop or the next starting point what are those mile poose so in order to do this we're going to use something that's a very high-tech tool and I'm going to grab a couple items for me here here's here's this high-tech tool that we are going to use in making M poost uh I have it in this handy little thing right here okay here's our high-tech tool are

you ready for it it's called a Post-It note we are going to use poits now ideally you have two different size poits I don't have two sizes with me I just have the 3in what you want is to have a 3in and a smaller one so for today we're going to do something you can do if you only have the three inch M uh 3inch Post-it notes so what what you can do is you can take off a few of those now if I had scissors this would be even neater but I don't so I'm

going to try to tear it carefully and I'm going to just tear this to where these sets of potit and I I want to have sticky on each so I'm tearing from the sticky side down to the other side what I've done is taken one potit and I've divided into three strips I can do that with scissors I can do that by tearing or I can do that by buying the smaller potit to begin with but don't do that with all your Post-its you still need to keep some of the big ones you're saying well

I don't have Post-its at my house right now okay get some blank paper and get some Scotch tape you can do that but poits are better and the reason is you're going to use them and you're going to move them around so uh you can do this on software too by the way I've done that a number of time where I plan on software I like using software in some settings the reason why I'm not recommending it now when you're doing this kind of creative process sometimes if you're doing software and you have to get

a box and move a box and draw a box and reshape a box you end up focusing too much on the technology than just to post it that you can grab and you can write on and you can move on so here's here's what we do with these these postes you you uh well first of all this is important you know I'm going to give you the backstory of potit um because it has nothing to do with anything but I just think it's kind of cool you know poits were discovered by an inventor at the

3M Corporation when he was trying to do something else he was not trying to make poit what he was trying to do his name was Spencer Silver and in 1968 so probably before most of you that are watching this video were born in 1968 he was trying to make strong adhesive to use in Aerospace basically like to build airplanes and stuff like that he was trying to come up with this strong adhesive well he made this adhesive but the adhesive was really weak and and so he's like well what do I do with the weak

adhesive uh it doesn't leave a residue which is kind of cool but it's just a weak adhesive so he's speaking in a conference somewhere and there's another guy who uh was in his conference who saw what was going on that guy's name is art fry now art fry was a good churchgoing guy art fry went to church and he would sing out of a Himel and he would take uh like little pieces of paper and stick them in his Himel to mark his spot that's why I think it's cool for what we're doing this relates

to church he'd stick these pieces of paper in his Himel but he'd open the Himel and the P pieces of paper would fall out and then he wouldn't know where he was supposed to be in his Himel and so when he saw what was going on with silver fry talked to Silver the two of them put their heads together and and they came up with a prototype for something that became one of the most popular office and home and school tools in the world in making Post-it notes became 3m's Big Money Maker they discovered it

by accident because they were trying to make something for airplanes but instead made Post-its so that was for free and uh we'll we'll come back to that well I'll probably quiz you all about that so but anyway back to mile poost so when you're making mile poost what you want to do is as you're listening throughout this course and you hear something you're like man that's something if I were planting a church or maybe you're planting something else but if I were planting a church that's something I should do I should take care of and

uh and so you jot that down and you should have tons of those as many as you can think of important things that you need to get done but then you every now and then you'll have something major that you want to accomplish and that would be a full-size Post-it so the average everyday idea that you want to come up with would be on the small Post-it and the and the major mile post the ones that if you don't get this done you cannot move forward those are going to be the big Post-it so let

me give you an example of that so let's imagine you are a church planner or you're working with your church planner and that church planner wants to get paid he's like um I've got another job maybe but I I want to get paid by the church I want to be able to pay the rent where we're going to meet I need to buy some equipment all these things that he wants to do so so what you do is you would write mile poost related to that and you write them in past tense and here's what

I mean by that let's say that in order to get paid he has to have a bank account so his major mile poost is going to be bank account open so I'm going to just do that right now uh I'm going to abbreviate for the sake of the video I'm just going to put the initials but you would write this out and uh I got one dead pen let's see if the other one works all right you would you would write Bank account opened or in my case I just put Bao so that's my big

Post-it I know you can't really read that but there it is bank account open so I so I would have bank account open that would be my major mile poost so I would take that and I would have a whiteboard or a wall or one of the things we use a lot they make these giant post stits they're 20 inches wide and 30 inches tall those are great because you can move those around when you're working with a team so let's say I know that not every it's not all about finances I'm just using this

as an example and so bank account open would be our major mile poost well you can't just go out and open a bank account for a church plant there's actually like eight steps before you get to that point there's a first one would be incorporating your church with the state if you're going to have a bank account in the United States um with as an entity as a nonprofit it is best to be incorporated so what I would put on here is I would put church incorporated again I put it in past tense I just

put the initials for today I would put church incorporated and that would be my first mile poost okay and I'm going to put that way over here this is a smaller mile poost now in addition to that I would have um I'm going to get What's called the federal employee identification number you get this from the from the IRS so I'm going to put down Fein and I'll put the letter s for secured so Fein secured I've got my number now the reason why it's good to do mile poost like this and let's imagine I

wrote on all these others that I'm doing stuff in order to get the bank account some places you got to get a business license um you have to have a mailing address and we recommend in church plants we use UPS Store boxes and the reason why we use UPS Store boxes is because you can get anything shipped there it's secure it's not your home so you're not putting your home address on Church publicity and people are showing up at your door freaking out your family begging for food or we want to help the people in

need but we don't need them coming to your house when you're not there and your kids are there or whatever so what we do is we would secure that um UPS Store box reason we don't use the post office is the post office will only receive US mail whereas a UPS Store will receive all kinds of mail I get massive boxes delivered to our box all this kind of stuff even though I rent a little box I can get anything shipped there Amazon whatever all right so we get all these steps and the reason why

it's cool to do it this way way let's say that I came up with these ideas and for some reason I didn't think about getting um getting my uh new name with the church and I had it over here and I you know getting Incorporated with the with the state uh well I could realize it's out of order and I can move it around to be in the right order okay we use the same kind of process when we're planning Ministries within the church where we can have flows and pictures and we can show how

people flow from being a somebody who doesn't know Jesus to knowing Jesus to being a disciple to being a leader to being part of a church planning team to being a lead Church planner to being a network leader way out there kind of like what I do like you're far down the road so using these poits in this way is helpful now what I want you to know is as we do these poits I want you to do this throughout the course every single class you should be coming up with at least the the little

Post-its and maybe maybe every class or two you come up with the big one you should you shouldn't have a ton of these maybe there's a half a dozen a dozen at most you could have 100 of these in planting a church plant now I'm not going to check and the taas aren't going to check we're not going to look and make sure oh you did all the posted but if you don't do the process you will miss out on the experience and you probably won't be able to answer some of the courses about M

poost and your plan towards the end of the term so that's what we'd like for you to do is work on that process and do mile post with us so does that make sense I know you can't answer me but smile and no or I'll just keep talking that's the way it works here okay yeah you got it all right mile poost important part of a church planning process okay well we had three topics to cover today that was number one where we looked at our course and number two where we look at M poost

now we're on to number three which is our main part of the course for today and the main part is that we are going going to focus on the most important part of church planning I know everybody if you ever sit in a class or you hear somebody talk they always think their thing is the most important they always think what they do is the most important but I am here to tell you as a follower of Jesus Christ the most important part of this is God but the most important thing that we can do

is pray it is pray so this there's a famous famous author his and his name is Oswald Chambers and Oswald Chambers is most famous for his book called My Utmost For His Highest and he has a great quote about prayer that's maybe the most often quoted quote about prayer today and it says this prayer is not a preparation for the battle it is the battle I'm going to say that again again this should be on your quiz prayer is not a preparation for the battle prayer is the battle or it is is the battle see

it's the not only the first thing we should do it's the most important thing we should do too often as Christians we have what we you know you come into a meeting with a bunch of Christian leaders and we have zipper prayer and what I mean by zipper prayer is uh to start the the meeting we zip open our jacket with prayer we go do what we're going to do not really paying attention to God and then when we're done we zip it up with prayer and we're done we're that's a zipper prayer we're just

kind of we're kind of rubber stamping God uh we would love for you to bless all ideas that we have today instead of saying God what do you have for us today so so here's some things that we want to learn about prayer and why it's so important for Church Point that's the first thing we're going to cover let me give you three questions we're going to answer about prayer why is prayer essential for church planning that's our first question why is prayer essential for church planning the second question we're going to answer is how

do we lead the new Church Plant to become a Praying Church how do we do that and then third how can our partners help us in prayer and again we have a unit on Partners but just tell you who again partners are individuals churches networks of churches businesses anybody that's out there they're not in our church but they're praying for church how can our partners help us in prayer so those are the three things we're going to look at today so first of all why is prayer essential for church planning the first thing in prayer

and the thing that's most important about prayer is prayer aligns our hearts with God and His will um now um there's so many ways I can talk about this I mean one of them is when I was a kid I remember praying and and they were teaching us and praying that we should praise God and tell him how wonderful he is now I don't know about you I'm just being honest when I was a kid and saying you want me to tell God who is God how awesome he is I remember thinking man how SEC

insecure is God he needs he needs me to tell him he's great is he really that insecure well of course God's not insecure God is the creator of all the knower of all the giver of all life he is our Lord and savior God is all and in all he's the Alpha and Omega he has absolutely nothing to be insecure about but here's what I found and what I learned over Years is as I pray praises to God as I recognize him not just thanking him for what he's done for me but just praying in

my prayer saying God you are a wonderful awesome Mighty God you are The Giver of all things and as I pray those things out loud I'm hearing myself speak truth in doing so my heart is aligned with God and God's will I have a better understanding of who he is when I went to Seminary many many years ago we've already heard about that when I went to Seminary um I had to take a music course now my undergraduate course again was I was trained to be a high school choir teacher so uh I'll I'll give

you some conducting lessons or something later but that was my training so I'm a singer I used to tour and stuff I so when I got to Seminary um I needed to take a music class but they had a basic class to teach pastors teach people who were not musicians how to be a four four time signature or how to you know how to read music and all that and well I'd just taken four years of that and so they didn't make me take that course they said you can pick another more advanced music class

so I picked one that was Canada and oratorio literature so think when you think Canada in oratorial Think Like handles Messiah something like that and we learned about it but then we also had to take a piece of music and analyze it we had to study it and talk about it musically and talk about the story and the word painting and you know the Dynamics all these different things in the music and uh it was pretty interesting experience for me what I chose to study Was melon's Elijah a composer named melson and he composed a

piece called Elijah and in Elijah the one thing that really stood out to me from that whole thing I'm a tener may not be able to tell from my speaking voice my voice gets lower over the years but you know I can sing first tener I can sing bass but I you know I'm a tener and in there there's just this beautiful ARA just a wonderful piece of this tener singing very melodic and I'm not going to do it for you now that's not what this class is you know call me up in the phone

sometime and I'll I'll sing a little bit but it said the words of the ARA were this if with all your hearts you truly seek me you shall ever Truly find me again if with all your hearts you truly seek me you shall ever truly find me these are words from God in Jeremiah 29:13 where he's saying look if you look for me you're going to find me if you truly look for me you truly seek me you're going to find me well how do we do that we do that from studying God's word to

understand who he's been throughout history but more personally we do it through prayer we spend time with him our goal in prayer is not just to come up with um a wish list or something we'll talk more about that a minute but our goal in prayer is to know God more than even knowing his will first we want to know who God is and through that it moves from a head level to a heart level it moves from knowledge about God to a relationship with God we want that to happen on a faith level we

want God's word to be alive and true in our lives we want to connect with him in prayer so how do we do that well let's first do that by let's defining let's define prayer good I'll just tell you now anytime I say let's define something that's a good clue it's probably going to be on the your quizzes but here it is this is what prayer is prayer is communication with God prayer is communication with God taught by Jesus and empowered by the Holy Spirit prayer is communication with God taught by Jesus and empowered by

the holy spirit communication involves both listening and speak speaking uh we actually are better communicators if we listen first and then speak if we listen for understanding not for how we're going to respond do you spend time in prayer with God and just sit there and listen see prayer is like breathing out and breathing in breathing out is is is when we're talking to God but breathing in is when we're receiving from God you got to breathe in before you have anything to breathe out right so listening to God that is what we want to

do in prayer and then sharing our hearts and our praise and our Thanksgiving and our confession and then after we've done all those things we can tell God what's been on our heart that are the needs scripture tells that God gives us the desires of our heart well that's usually taken out of context because what happens is people think you know I just need to I just need to pray and God has to give it to me I'm just going to claim he's got to give it to me what what he's saying is if you're

in line with my heart your heart is my heart I'll give you the desires of my heart of your heart if you spend more time with me and you are devoted to me you are in true relationship with me then I will give you the desires of your heart God knows far more than we ever will can we agree to that he knows all he sees all we don't come close to that so don't you think in a communication setting with God where we're talking with God not to God but when we're talking with God

if he knows more than we do shouldn't we be listening more than we're talking and quite often when we pray we just get in there and blah we just put it out there and we don't take time to listen we need to listen to God we don't need to take him and say God's like the genie and the lamp lamp in Aladdin it's like dear God please give me this give me we're rubbing the lamp praying for our three wishes that's not who God is God is the one who created us who gave us life

and if we know Jesus as our Lord and savior gives us life and new and eternal why would we want not want to know him better and be in relationship with him in Psalm 46:10 it says this be still and know that I am God what does he tell us to do be still now if you're hyperactive that may be hard for you if you're somebody who like me I'm I'm always coming up the next thing wanting to dream wanting to create wanting to do wanting to come up with action steps and plan it all

out Post-it notes that just that's natural kind of stuff for me that means I have to work harder to shut it all down get along with God close the door and listen to spend time with him to be still and know that he is God that's the biggest priority we have once we know him then we can start to understand his will for us his plans for us Proverbs 35 and 6 says trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding and all your ways acknowledge Him and He will

make your paths straight some will say make your paths smooth trust God know him and then he's going to make it clear what you're supposed to do God does not always tell us his plans in advance but if we're in tune with him if we are walking with him unless he's holding back from us to teach us something he's the one that makes us makes our path straight he's the one that makes it clear for us what we're to do once we know him and we trust him more the more dependent we become h on

him and that's a good thing that's our second point the better we know him the more dependent we become upon him Philippians 46 and7 sayso not be anxious about anything but in everything by prayer and supplication which means asking requesting with Thanksgiving giving God praise let your request be made known to God and the peace of God which surpasses all understanding will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus so again it starts with don't be anxious and that's the thing you know when we're worry we're it's basically negative meditation we are dwelling on

things over and over and over again and we're not trusting God but he says so don't be anxious don't worry about anything you know the song Don't Worry Be Happy he didn't come up with it that was from God don't worry about anything but by prayer and supplication with Thanksgiving let your request be known to God there's a time in my life when I was so set on church planning was so in tune with what God wanted for my life I was committed to doing what I'm doing now before I had even planted my first

church and when the opportunity came to me and they actually asked me to lead and start a network Seattle church planning uh I so much wanted that I so desired that that I almost said no like oh that's not what God wants that's what I want and God basically said to me probably a little Kinder this than this but where do you think you got the idea dummy it the idea came from God because I was walking with God in that scenario and he made his heart known to me we want to be so in

tune with God that we almost ask ourselves did that really come from him because that's really the desire of my heart well if we're with him that desire comes from him so I want to give you another quote from Oswald Chambers he says this he says we have to pray with our eyes on God not on the difficulties prayer does not fit us for the greater work prayer is the greater work patience is more than endurance a Saint's life is in the hands of God like a bow and arrow in the hands of an Archer

we want to be so in tune with God that we're not worried about problems we're not worried about obstacles or challenges we see those as opportunities for God to show up in our lives we want to try to be more like God so that we can understand who he is so we ourselves are used by God we don't want to be God we want to be used by God and we do that by being in tune with who he is through prayer the third thing I want us to see of how this helps in church

planning is prayer invites God to work in Supernatural ways prayer invites God to work in Supernatural ways Colossians 4:3 says this pray for us too that that God may open a door for our message so that we may proclaim the mystery of Christ so this is pretty much a prayer that I pray in a in my own words for new church planners and new church plants whenever they're going into a community I have the opportunity to pray for them I often pray most of the time I pray this God be with them be with this

church plan but we ask God that your Holy Spirit would go ahead of them that your Holy Spirit would be at work in that community so that when this pastor comes and shares with people the good news of Jesus Christ they understand it and they know that it is true they Place their trust in you and begin a relationship with you that lasts forever I pray that God does a supernatural work not something humans have caused but by his holy spirit he does a supernatural work in that Community if we invite God into what we're

doing and it's stuff we can just do on our own we're depending on our own abilities and not really depending on him see the challenge is for those of you that are super talented individuals it's very easy for you to just Coast through life on your own abilities and God wants to tell us this is not about you it's not by might it's not by power but it's by my spirit says the Lord it's by his working these things are accomplished if we can accomplish it it is not Supernatural it is not the work of

the Holy Spirit we want God to do this work we want him to be present in our church we want it to be his church not our own so once we do this uh we gain this understanding we can go forward it's the same thing we learn in evangelism remember we're sharing the good news of Jesus Christ in the power of the Holy Spirit and leaving the results to God it takes the weight off of us and it puts it where it should be for God to do the work so once we accept that this

is important in our life and our church plants life now we can lead our church planting team and the rest of our church to be a people of prayer as well we can't do that if we're not people of prayer otherwise we're just faking it and people know that be a person of prayer so you can lead a people of prayer so how do we lead the new Church Plant to become a Praying Church to become a people of prayer well first of all I just kind of gave you that idea lead by example you

must model a life of prayer if you pray with your church and you and they hear you pray and they're like boy this guy didn't ever pray I mean he he do know how to talk to God he doesn't get it you know I I've been with people I had a professor in college that was this way I had you know uh some of these people I told the story of Henry blackby people that you hear them pray it's like they're just sitting there having a conversation with god they're not being disrespectful but they're so

close it's like they're talking to them just like you would talk to your best friend we want to lead by example and have that heart of prayer Mark 135 says this very early in the morning while it was still dark Jesus got up left the house and went off to a solitary place where he prayed As Leaders we need to have a life of prayer that's modeled after a life of Jesus I'm not saying do it always at the exact same time somebody else did I'm saying have a life of prayer pray without ceasing start

your day with praying pray throughout the day Pray when you're with people pray for situation don't talk to somebody that says I have this need then you say well I'll pray for you and then you don't pray for them pray for it pray pray pray so that's the first thing we do is be that example through prayer the second thing is that we can encourage people through prayer what do we mean by that we want to encourage corporate prayer we want to encourage the church to pray together so when you're starting your church gather your

team together at times for no other reason but prayer don't get them together to plan don't get them together to go out and do our I mean do those things too but there needs to be times and they need to be at the beginning where and throughout where the first thing you do is gather them for prayer when you're having worship give significant time in the worship service for prayer uh I I have a boss that he his name is Randy and Randy will say he's amazed how many times he goes and preaches in a

church and he'll get up to preach and they haven't even prayed through the whole service to that point they they just kind of left it off the menu they didn't pray and I've been at other churches where they spend a major time of worship worshiping together praying and they have leaders pray and then you know some will do spontaneous prayers we're often used to do doing but others will write out their prayers and they will go through the things of praying worship to God you know of lifting him up they will pray about Thanksgiving to

God they will pray about confessing the sins that they not going and telling on somebody but press for pro excuse me professing the sins that we've committed as a people uh sharing that with God they will talk about the needs in in the church and they'll pray for those things and so it's very important that we lead people to be praying and we teach them by our example in how we pray but also have special Gatherings for your church as it goes on in prayer have prayer meetings yes it's good to come together and pray

for people who are sick it's good to pray for people who have needs you know maybe they they lost their home or something like that those are important but it's more important to pray for people's salvation so come together and pray for people to know God to know him better and to walk with him have times devoted just for that and for not only the church to be lifted up but for the kingdom to expand set the example for your people how to pray look at the apostles when they walked with Jesus he's they said

teach us to pray and he did and we talked about that prayer sum last week so pray and give that example make it a priority acts 1:14 talks about the apostles uh even before the church really kind of formed into being says they were all continually United in prayer along with the women including Mary the mother of Jesus and his brothers they came together they were continually United in prayer it tells us spend time together in prayer the the other thing that through this we need to do our third thing that we need to do

to make it important is we need to teach people how to pray so not just having times to pray making a priority those kind of things but teach them how to do it so offer training courses like times where you come together and teach them to pray and actually pray with them in that have your small group leaders teach on prayer and and model prayer and then do things like walk through your community with them and pray for your community teaching them how to pray for their neighbors as they go on walks through the community

but making it intentional you're you're not just going for a walk you're going and praying for the community and there's so many different ways that you can do prayer walks uh great ways to engage the community so those are all important the other thing that we need to look at so we've talked about why prayer is important we've talked about how to make your church a Praying Church the other thing we need to do is help our partners so how can our partners help us in prayer so we're going to get into some more of

this in sessions 10 11 when we talk on partners but there's a few things that you can work on now uh whatever your ministry is if you have a Ministry or you have something you're doing in life is one is to recruit people to pray for you our church planners before they go start a church we tell them they need to have at least 50 people committed to pray for them and not just saying yes I'll pray but we actually have them signed a covenant with expectations of what that means if they're going to pray

daily or they're going to pray weekly they're going to be available to stop and pray when I send them a text about I'm going to share the gospel with Bob and Susie I need somebody to pray we actually have a covenant and we want them to have at least 50 people I know one Church planner he had 500 people praying for him as he planted his church and it made a huge difference so have those people create a covenant with them and the other thing I'd say is is take them on prayer walks with you

if they can be there in person great if not you can take your phone and walk through a community and and you can either live stream or record something they can watch later as you pray through the community and you show them the homes and you you talk about the people you know in the community and this is how we're praying for this family and this how we're praying for this person and we're praying for God to bless this business or bless this school or bless this other church that's down the street uh you can

bring your partners together with you by bringing them in through virtual prayer walks or real in-person prayer walks uh you can encourage them in their churches in their corporate Gatherings of their churches when they get together or in their business or friends getting together where they will pray specifically for your church one of the things we've done is when we have an Outreach event or we have a first service in a church plant we will live stream it to a partner Church a lot of times those churches are in another time zone maybe they've already

had worship they stick around and have dinner together and then they watch our service and they pray for us while they see what's going on in this service or in the community outreach event that we're doing the other another thing that you can do with Partners is you can have them pray for your neighborhoods they can use a tool such as one called bless every home you go to bless everyhome.com and on there people can pray for a neighborhood by name they see their addresses and their names and they can keep track of of prayers

for them they can mark that they prayed for somebody if they live in that Community they can Mark if the gospel's been shared with these people but we can pray for each home in a church planner's community so here's the important thing prayer is not a priority it's not a good thing it's not a nice thing or important thing prayer is the priority it is the top thing we need to focus on doing so here's a prayer I'm going to read a prayer to you uh so I'm going to pray this over you God please

help us meaning you and me to have greater dependence on you Lord and for the those in this class who do not yet know you as Lord and Savior uh to listen to the holy spirit this week prepare them Lord as we come together next week to pray to learn about how to share our faith prepare them Lord by your spirit so that when they hear the gospel they will hear the truth know the truth believe the truth and respond in truth to Jesus and it's in His holy name that we pray amen