At Osborne Baptist Church, we believe prayer is a big deal. In April 2018, we began a church-wide 40-day prayer campaign with an emphasis on deepening our prayer lives and drawing people closer to God through prayer. Our main goals were to help people understand how to pray, what to pray for, and encourage them to actually pray more! We live in a digital world where everything is connected and accessible at the touch of a finger and in order to give our people valuable prayer tools we knew they would use, we had to turn to digital solutions.

One of our favorite tools we used during this campaign were text message prayer prompts. For each day of our series, we texted out a simple prayer and encouraged our church to pause and pray when they received the text. The prayer prompts were specific and covered topics like praying for our church, our community, our families, those hurting around us, and more.

The response we received to the prayer prompts blew us away. Within the first weekend of starting the campaign, we had over 400 people sign up. By the end of the first week, we reached almost 600 contacts. That week, we began seeing text message screenshots all over social media as well. People called our church office and pastor just to say how much they appreciated the texts and how applicable the prayer for that day was to their current situation. We continued to hear about people taking these text messages, praying over them, and even sharing with others they came in contact with. Many said that it helped them get their minds off of present circumstances and back on God while disciplining themselves to talk to God first about problems instead of worrying. One piece of feedback we received said that the prayer prompts helped them create the expectation to pray first thing in the morning.

txtsignal was instrumental in the success of our prayer campaign. txtsignal allowed us to schedule prayer prompts ahead of time and maintain consistent and professional text deliveries. Our contacts began to expect a morning text message which created excitement for them as they waited to see their prayer for the day.

Using text messages for our communication allowed us to deliver info to our contacts that required little effort on their part. After the quick initial sign up, nothing else was required of them. They didn’t have to visit a web page every day or keep up with a print out for the entire series – they simply had to read a daily text message delivered right to their phone, regardless of what type of phone they have.

For our staff working to guarantee a successful prayer campaign, we appreciated how quick and easy setting up our txtsignal account and message schedule was. The interface is intuitive and user-friendly; we didn’t have to learn a program or even coordinate with txtsignal’s team. After creating an account, every feature was open and ready to use.

Our staff also appreciated the insights that txtsignal provided. We were able to observe the trend of subscribers over our campaign and even the success rate of delivered messages. Also, if contact provided their name to txtsignal’s automatic inquiry, we were able to capture that information. We received several responses to text messages through txtsignal’s interface and we appreciated being able to see who was replying to our messages.

Furthermore, as a church, we want to be culturally relevant and relatable. Today, smartphones and cell phones are the way people get work done, stay connected, and live their lives. It only makes sense for the church to also find ways someone can participate and deepen their faith through that same technology. Providing spiritual tools that incorporate technology also lets us, as a church, say to the people in our church that what we believe matters in the twenty-first century and that we care about helping people grow in their relationship with Jesus.

Anna Gibson
Media & Production Director
Osborne Baptist Church, Eden NC