Jennifer Taylor, who writes the Buzz article for The Christian Standard was kind enough to tell our text messaging story from Restore. Thanks Jen.
Here’s her article:
Rich Text
Believers have shared prayer requests for centuries—but only recently have they shared them via text message.To wrap up a seven-week series on the Old Testament, leaders at Restore Community Church (Kansas City, Missouri) wanted to guide the congregation in praying about its major themes. In week six, Restore invited everyone to opt-in for a week of prayer reminders by texting the word “testament” to a specific number. Each person who signed up received one text message each day the following week.
“For instance, the first series theme was blessing, so the first day we sent a text message asking people to think about how God had blessed them and how they could bless others,” says Tommy Bowman, creative arts director. “The message invited them to reply with a short texted prayer. We did this each day and collected all the answers.”
On the following Sunday, week seven of the series, Bowman displayed more than 50 of the anonymous prayers during worship.
“I edited out the very personal ones and copied others into our presentation software,” he says. “The band played a song, and we asked everyone to silently pray these prayers along with the person who had sent the message.”
A Restore member created TextCaster, the software used to send the messages and organize the responses, and he was eager to help the church use it in some way.
“But we never use technology just to do it—it must further the mission of the service,” Bowman says. “This also succeeded because we introduced text messaging for a specific time and a specific reason. So we built trust with our church which enables us to use this technology again.”
More than 170 people signed up to participate, and even more found it an especially meaningful experience.
“People saw their own needs in the words of others, and commented on the privilege of praying for them,” says Bowman. “People connected to these prayers.”
