Why the sudden need to communicate?

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It wasn’t that long ago, that I relied on paper based communication through the post, to keep me informed of social issues and matters of National importance, which in turn helped to keep my prayer life focussed.

What I found though, was the more concerned I became about these issues, the more organisations I linked with and inevitably the more mail I received. This led to quite a dilemma. I realised that several Christian agencies were putting out the same news from their perspective, the combined costs of which were substantial, in order to solicit my prayer and lobbying support.

As a prayer ministry ourselves, we were both being asked for information about various issues by email, and had the same dilemma, lots of duplication and cost to mobilise prayer for the same issue.The last few years had also seen the creation of a consolidated Christian news service called Prayer Alert www.prayer-alert.net which had made several strides toward making sense of a world of information both from Christian and Secular sources. This weekly email provides a very well balanced, well thought out roundup of National and International news, purposed to mobilise prayer.

We started to think through the processes of providing a consolidated website service, which would be updated every day with news primarily focused on our family of Nations, England, Wales, Scotland, Ireland (North & Republic), The Isle of Man and of course the Channel Isles. When we began to investigate we realized that there are around 300 news sources internationally providing some kind of email news bulletin or comment from a Christian perspective, all of which suffered from the same thing – relying on people to read their email as soon as it arrived.

In our research we realised that the market average for people opening mass email is 17%, that is individuals who have signed up for an email list, open roughly one in every six emails they are sent by that list. There are of course exceptions, and we are talking averages, but on the whole email has become more inefficient than paper based mail at communicating a vital message.
It wasn’t that long ago, that I relied on paper based communication through the post, to keep me informed of social issues and matters of National importance, which in turn helped to keep my prayer life focussed.

In our research we realised that the market average for people opening mass email is 17%, that is individuals who have signed up for an email list, open roughly one in every six emails they are sent by that list. There are of course exceptions, and we are talking averages, but on the whole email has become more inefficient than paper based mail at communicating a vital message. The cost saving over Also people don’t appreciate you filling up their inboxes with email, so the most frequently updated information place would be our website. This followed up by a weekly email and when there was an urgent matter for prayer a weekly SMS text, highlighting the most important issue of the week.

The reality is people are bombarded by information. The average person sees 5,000 adverts per day (study by Yankelovich), receives countless pieces of junk mail, has the option of watching several hundred TV channels each time TV is watched, can communicate directly with friends anywhere in the world and can research any subject through a library of over 108 million websites through a mechanism we all know as the internet. This not to mention the fact that if you walk through a city in the UK these days you will be videoed by surveillance cameras more than 400 times in a day.

With so much secularisation of society, Christianity is being marginalised and several Christian organisations have in recent years come to the fore to both defend the right of Christians to express their faith in freedom and also to lobby for legislation that is sympathetic to Biblical principles, freedom of speech and high moral standing. Yet in order to do this, now more than ever, Christian organisations and the church itself is finding it has to compete for the thinking space of individuals across the Nation.
How does this affect the Church ?

Imagine this Senario: A Christian organisation, writes to 20,000 Churches encouraging prayer and lobbying of local MP’s on a freedom of speech issue which will be voted on let’s say a week on Thursday. It’s cost the organisation approx
£10,000 to send out this mailer and Church secretaries and Ministers all over the Nation are faithful in bringing the issue to the attention of their congregation.

There’s only a around 10 days for people to write to their MP, so people start to get busy. Parliamentary scheduling is so busy, and as the summer recess is coming, voting begins to be moved around from it’s original scheduled slot and after several thousand Christians have decided the issue was important enough to meet together to pray on Thursday (the day of the vote), the vote get’s moved forward three days to Monday, to accommodate the increased activity in Parliament. This has two effects. Firstly people will end up praying three days late! and complaints letters could even arrive after the vote has been cast.

At that point, there is also no time left for the Christian lobbying organisation to send out another letter informing people of the new voting date, so the combination of method and cost of delivery to mobilise what is a sleeping giant of a lobby group ‘Christendom’ has failed to make a positive impact in the voting of the bill.

If Christians across the Nation were connected to a Mobile Phone SMS text service, this could have been avoided, quite cheaply. A simple text could have been sent to everyone, informing people of a news update about the bill concerned, encouraging them to visit a website or read an email for up to date information.

We have developed just such a service. Developed to mobilise Prayer and keep people informed of the issues in society that affect Christianity.
Imagine receiving an SMS text asking you to pray because there has just been a terrorist attack, or a reminder to pray for an abortion bill going through Parliament, the service forms part of a network of information sharing to help Christians everywhere, be more informed, know when and how to pray, and most importantly of all, the news is shared as it happens rather than several days later which is true of other forms of communication. We’ll all still of course keep up our traditions of reading newspapers, praying through ministry newsletters, debating issues in friendship groups and hearing Biblical truth about issues in our local Church. Pray Right Now is a fast and efficient trigger to remind us all to pray right then, right there, for something that will often have just happened somewhere else within the Nation.

If you choose to subscribe, you just have to SMS Text the word PRAY to 82088, and the service will become active. We will send you one text per week at a cost of 25p. Prayer in Action makes three and half pence per text, which covers our staff costs, the rest of the charge is paid to the technology providers and the phone company.

You can of course unsubscribe at any point, and there is a reminder of how to do that with every text we send. So for less than the cost of a stamp, you’ll get a weekly prompt to pray for what’s important in our Nation, as it happens, backed up by the information provided by most of the Key Christian ministries we all love to connect with.
Carl Brettle