Pray, Invite, Ask… What?

Our church is hyper-focused on evangelizing our community, and so are many of your communities of faith. So we are continually communicating various ideas for our members to use in the mission. 

One of those is the phrase: “pray, invite, ask.” We expect all of our members to be doing these three things. The only problem with this is that we found it to be a catchy phrase, but we needed more depth and understanding. Pray what? Invite to what? Ask what?

Below are a few helpful hints we have been sharing with our people. Maybe these will be helpful with your people also.

Pray. We encourage praying for individual people you know. Pray for God to open their hearts. Pray for opportunities. But pray by name for friends and family you want to reach for the Kingdom.  

Pray for God to send people. Since our church began intently praying this prayer, people just show up. Random people that no one seems to know. They walk into the assembly. They come by the church office. They call. So we pray for those encounters.

Pray for more workers. We need help making disciples. Teaching them the Jesus way. Following Luke 10:2, we pray for workers for the harvest.

Invite. We encourage our people to invite people to church with them. Pick them up, sit with them, buy a meal. Invite people to special occasions. Breakfast with Santa. Trunk or treat. Family events. Youth activities. Christmas Eve service. And invite people for intentional meals. Meals to get to know people. Meals to connect with other members of our church. Meals to talk about Jesus. Meals to share a Jesus story.

Ask. Ask the visitors if they have questions. Ask if there is anything we can pray for. Ask if they would like to talk about Jesus. Ask about their Jesus journey or faith experience. Ask if we can share our testimony.  

Pray, invite, ask. More than a catchy phrase. Specific, concrete ways to do this.

Our people have responded. They do these, and we all expect God to do great things.

And He does.