mediableep

We first began this discussion a month ago when the MediaSalt community was in its infancy; we’ve since grown over 300%, so there many new brains available to contribute to the conversation… How should we rethink the email prayer chain?

Several common pieces of functionality make up the average church website; one of these is handling prayer requests. The Internet Boom of the 90s saw the dawn of the email prayer chain in what was probably one of the first examples of the church gathering online. Unfortunately, it seems that the Church has not come up with a better solution even a decade later.

Today, let’s start the first of (hopefully) many conversations revolving around common problems the Church attempts to solve with technology. Let’s get the ball rolling with how our churches handle prayer requests.

I’ll start things off by explaining how we do prayer requests at Long Hollow (where I serve on staff), and leave it to you to keep the conversation rolling; we’re anxious to hear your thoughts!

Here’s What We Do:

1. The visitor submits their prayer request directly to us using a brief form at the top of our prayer wall. You can see the live page of our prayer wall here: http://www.longhollow.com/prayer.
2. The prayer request goes into a “holding tank,” awaiting moderation. One of our staff members looks over every prayer request before we make it public to other visitors. This catches stuff like fake posts, profanity, and requests which provide a little too much information.
3. The edited request is posted live to the online prayer wall and to our mobile app.
4. The prayer wall is syndicated through RSS and email subscriptions. The same back end code that dynamically generates the prayer wall also generates an RSS feed with the same content. By using the excellent Feedburner service, we can also provide email subscriptions to the content in this feed.
5. The visitor which originally posted the prayer request receives feedback. One thing that bothers me about the typical email prayer chain is it’s tendency to turn into a gossip line. I wanted to find a way to make these prayer requests actionable items instead of something you passively read over. With some simple back end programming, I added a “ticker” to each prayer request that keeps a running tally of how many times people have prayed for the specific request; it has been a big hit so far.

What Do You Do?

You’ve seen the approach we’ve taken for longhollow.com; what approach do you take at your church? Have you seen a great example of managing prayer requests somewhere else? Join the discussion in the comments below.

[Image © Dennis Rassing]