Heather was working away at her yard, pulling weeds and doing landscaping, when out of the corner of her eye she saw her neighbor emerge from her house. Her neighbor was taking her dogs out for a walk as she did every day. But this wasn’t like every other day, because this was the first time Heather had seen her neighbor since deciding to talk to her.
“Just a few days before, Heather had met with her small group. They took a few minutes to pray about which neighbors they each wanted to build relationships with. God brought this woman to Heather’s mind,” Matthew Watts writes in the MissionHub blog.
Heather’s neighbor didn’t have a relationship with God and Heather wanted to reach her, to tell her about Jesus, to give her an opportunity to accept Christ and begin a relationship with the Lord.
But Heather hadn’t known where to start. She saw her neighbor often but didn’t know how to broach such a subject. How can she bring up such a heavy topic without it being awkward or weird? Heather turned to the MissionHub app, which suggested several steps of faith she could take. Heather chose one: Ask her neighbor about her experience with other Christians.
Heather had previously prayed about an opportunity to speak with her neighbor and here it was, while her neighbor was taking the dogs for a walk. Heather dropped her gardening tools and caught up to her neighbor to start the conversation.
“I was definitely more proactive in creating space for her and being intentional,” Heather says. “I never would have thought to ask her that question if the app had not suggested it.”
Taking a step for growth
Everyone is on a spiritual journey, whether you’re a new Christian, someone who has been following Jesus for decades, or someone who doesn’t believe He exists. Wherever we are on our journey, there is room for growth. We want to grow closer to God, to build our relationship with Him. For Heather, the next step she needed to take was talking to her neighbor. For someone else, it might be praying for someone or setting aside time in the Word. All steps of faith matter.
In a recent episode of Indigitous PULSE, Indigitous Managing Director Russ Martin talked about how the MissionHub app can help you grow closer to God through taking steps of faith.
“We all want to grow spiritually,” Russ says. But that growth can be difficult. It takes time, effort, and having some idea of what on earth you’re supposed to do. “Steps of faith in MissionHub help us do what we already want to do but in a simple way, in a guided way.”
This is the same as with other growth areas. If you want to become more physically fit, you need to put time and effort into that. You need to eat healthier foods and exercise regularly. Fitness apps can help by helping you track your meals and exercises, find workout routines, and see clear next steps to take on your journey. A Couch To 5K app, for example, helps you gradually work your way up to long-distance running.
You can do the same with MissionHub. You can use it to track your own spiritual journey as well as the people who you want to reach for Jesus. You can find next steps to take in your own spiritual growth and with your friends and acquaintances. And you can log the steps you take to track the progress of your own spiritual growth and the growth of those you want to reach.
Sharing your faith
One key part of any Christian’s growth is sharing their faith with others, but most Christians don’t regularly share. Many Christians have never shared the Gospel.
“Often evangelism feels scary because we don’t know what to say or we don’t know what to do,” Russ says. MissionHub helps to remove that friction by sharing some ideas, conversation starters, and activities you can do to show that you love and care for the people around you.
MissionHub challenges
Within MissionHub, there are groups you can join. Many of those groups have challenges that you can take on. Those challenges provide a series of steps for you to take as well as accountability, as you can track with the other people who took the challenge to see how everyone did.
That community aspect can make it easier to grow spiritually, since you can motivate and inspire each other. “It’s something you’re doing with other people, so you’re not alone in that,” Russ says. “You have the success stories of the others who are doing the challenge with you. It’s a really neat way to trust God to do something together.”
Grow in your prayer life
One of the most important things we can do as a Christian is to pray. Prayer is not only a way to petition God, but also just a way to communicate and enter His presence. Your relationship with a spouse or your best friend won’t be good if you don’t talk to each other, and the same is true of a relationship with God.
But like evangelism, many Christians struggle with their prayer lives. For many of us, we don’t take the time to pray each day even though we know we should. Maybe it’s because we think we’re too busy. Maybe it’s because we’re frustrated because God doesn’t seem to be answering our prayers. But often, it’s simply because we don’t know what to pray.
Prayer can become a ritual, something you do because you know you’re supposed to, but you’re just going through the motions. Maybe you pray the same thing all the time because you just don’t know what to pray about.
Russ uses MissionHub as a prayer prompt to help him keep his prayers fresh and meaningful. “I try to set one day a week where I get up early. There’s a park nearby. I just go and walk the park and I pull up my MissionHub app and I pray through the people in the app using the prayer prompts from MissionHub to help me,” Russ says. “I find that so helpful because I want to pray, I need to pray, but often I don’t actually know what to pray for for my friends.”
The most essential habit
Wherever you are in your spiritual journey, whether you’re brand new to the faith or if you’ve been a Christian your whole life, according to Russ, there is one habit that is essential to grow in your faith: taking regular time each day to spend with the Word.
That doesn’t necessarily mean spending time alone in a quiet room with a printed Bible on your lap. That may be the best way for you, but for some, there are better ways to engage with the Word. It could be through listening to an audio Bible. It could be reading it on your phone while sitting on a park bench. It could be through any number of digital interactive Bible experiences.
“There are so many apps that can help us read the Bible, listen to the Bible, study the Bible,” Russ says. “But I think the main thing is that you and the Lord have the time together, and time in the Bible, time in the Word, is a big part of that. It doesn’t have to be long. It can be five minutes. It can be an hour if you have that luxury. But developing a habit of regularly spending time with God in His Word and prayer I think will do wonders for your growth.”