B - begin with prayer
Ask God to show you 3 people who are far from God that you can pray for.
Listen to what God says about those people and pray for them regularly. Check in with them and ask, “How can I pray for you?” After a bit you can tell them, “I’ve been praying for you. Have you noticed anything?”
“I will make you into a great nation, and I will bless you; I will make your name great, and you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and whoever curses you I will curse; and all peoples on earth will be blessed through you.”
Genesis 12:2-3
L - listen
Ask questions and engage in real conversations to learn people’s stories.
Listen more than you talk and see if you notice any ways God may be at work in their lives.
Begin having conversations about meaningful things like peace, love, fear, death, purpose, etc. You could:
Ask a question: Have you ever thought about…
Share a personal discovery: Yesterday I learned that…
Share a personal commitment: Recently, I decided to…
Ask for interaction: What do you think about that?
With all the uncertainty going on now, ask people questions like, “What’s giving you hope?”
E - eat (share a meal)
Intentionally spend time with people connecting with them.
Invite people to share a meal or meet for coffee. Listen and engage with them while you hang out.
S - serve
Look for opportunities to practically show people God’s love by meeting their needs.
Some ideas could be:
Due to social distancing, place signs on doors throughout your community offering to pray, drop off groceries, or help in other ways and leave your contact information.
Create Facebook groups and Zoom hangouts for your neighbors.
Call people who are isolated and see how they are doing.
Bring someone a meal.
Offer to pray for someone.
S - story (share the Gospel and your story)
As you’re praying, listening, eating, and serving, start spiritual conversations.
What are the main topics of conversation with your three people? Come up with some spiritual statements you can make. Spiritual statements should be short and something that could be ignored if people aren’t interested. The people God is working in will usually follow up on a spiritual statement by asking something like, “What do you mean by that?”
Some examples of spiritual statements could be:
When I pray and read the Bible, it gives me peace and helps me not to worry so much.
With all the stuff going on in our country, I just have to put my trust in God that he’s got everything in control.
I know the hardships I’m facing won’t be purposeless since God says he works all things together for my good.
Once you’ve had one spiritual conversation, you can always have another. Try saying something like,
“I thought about what you said in our last conversation about [whatever you talked about last] and it made me think of this story in the Bible …”