Mobilizing Prayer: The Conversation Quadrants

Prayer is the tip of the spear in the arsenal of a disciple maker, so what are the tools we can use to mobilize it?

Seeking God’s heart for our communities, neighborhoods and cities is the first step in seeing movement happen. There are many prayer tools we can use to do this, but today we’re going to focus on praying through the Conversation Quadrants. Here’s how!

What are the Conversation Quadrants?

If you’ve been with CDM for any length of time, you’ve probably heard of The Conversation Quadrants, but in case you haven’t or are in need of a refresher, here it is.

The Conversation Quadrant is a simple tool for keeping track of interactions we’ve had with nonbelievers. It’s a way for us to see who God is drawing to Himself by organizing our conversations into four categories: Casual, Meaningful, Spiritual and Discovery.

• Casual is your basic, everyday conversation — weather, sports, current events, simple catch-up, getting to know someone.

• Meaningful is deeper. We move past casual and into someone’s personal life — their hopes, dreams, fears, sufferings, anything that expresses a heart need.

• Spiritual is anything that gets into what a person believes about the world — this could be politics, religion, social views, etc.

• Discovery conversations happen when we recognize a deep heart need in a person’s life and have the opportunity to share a story from God’s Word that speaks into that need.

Making Your Conversation Quadrants

1. Take a piece of paper and draw an X and Y axis.

2. Going from top-left to right, label each quarter with a different conversation type — Casual, Meaningful, Spiritual, and Discovery.

3. Take 5 minutes and have everyone think of the nonbelievers they’ve interacted with recently and write their names in the boxes that most accurately describe the kind of conversation they had.

4. If you’re in a group, you can use a whiteboard, large paper easel pad, your living room walls (not advised), or whatever else you want so that there’s one Conversation Quadrant that everyone can see and contribute to.

An example of what your Conversation Quadrants could look like.

Praying through the Conversation Quadrants

Once you have your Conversation Quadrants set up, ask the group to share stories of the conversations they’ve had with lost people.

• No story is too small!

• Go through each quadrant one at a time, asking people to share any opportunities they had to have that kind of conversation.

• As people share, be sure to write down the name of the storyteller and the person they talked to!

After everyone has had a chance to share, pray together as a group. Here is what that could look like!

• Pray aloud through each of the quadrants for everyone in the group and the nonbelievers they mentioned.

• You could do “popcorn” prayer where everyone can pray more than once as they feel led, or you can have one person pray for all the names in a specific quadrant.

• Celebrate the friendships and conversations with nonbelievers that God has already provided and the ways that He has progressed your conversations throughout the quadrants.

• Ask the Lord to continue to move your conversations with nonbelievers forward from quadrant to quadrant and to help you be good stewards of the time and relationships He’s given you.

• Pray that your interactions would ultimately lead to them, their friends and families discovering God for themselves in a Discovery Bible Study.

• When it feels appropriate to do so, have one person close out the time.

What does Praying through the Conversation Quadrants do?

Reaching and building relationships with those who don’t know Jesus requires intention and consistency. The Conversation Quadrant is not something we do once, but a tool that we keep coming back to over time.

It helps our groups make the transition from simply praying in general for our cities and the lost to praying for the specific people God has put in our lives.

By praying though the Conversation Quadrants together, we are able to intercede for our lost friends and communally seek the Lord’s help for our next steps, all while being mindful of where our conversations are going, where we‘d like them to be, and how we can get there.

Thanks for reading!