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Prayer Requests let your church share and pray for one another’s needs, both on your website and in the Our Church app. Members can submit a request, you moderate it, and once published it reaches your prayer chain by email, appears in the app, and sends a push notification to app users so people know to pray.
Prayer requests are a public custom post type, which means they’re searchable and can be displayed on the front end of your site like any other content.
Submitting a prayer request from your website
When you display the prayer requests archive on your site, a Submit a prayer request form appears at the top of the page. It has a Title field, a Prayer request box for the request itself, and a simple anti-spam checkbox (“Check box if not a spammer”) that must be ticked before the form will submit.
You can add your own introductory text above the form — for example a note about how requests are handled or how long they’re displayed — in the prayer request settings. This message shows between the heading and the form.
The form works with both modern block themes and older classic themes, so it should appear correctly whichever theme your church uses.
Moderation
When a member submits a prayer request through the website or the app, it is saved as a draft rather than published straight away. This gives you a moderation step: nothing appears publicly, goes to your prayer chain, or triggers notifications until an administrator reviews and publishes it.
To review submissions, go to Prayer Requests in your WordPress dashboard, where pending requests sit as drafts. Open one to check or edit the wording, then publish it when you’re happy. This lets you catch anything unsuitable, tidy up sensitive details, or hold a request back if the person only wanted it shared with leadership.
What happens when you publish
Publishing a prayer request sets three things in motion:
- Everyone in your prayer chain receives an email with the request.
- The request appears in the Our Church app.
- App users receive a push notification letting them know there’s a new request to pray for.
Keeping prayer requests private
Prayer requests can be sensitive, so you can choose to make them visible only to logged-in church members. When the private option is enabled in the prayer request settings, anyone who isn’t logged in sees a login form instead of the requests, and the submission form is only shown to logged-in users.
This is a good choice if your requests include personal details your congregation would not want visible to the wider public or search engines. Left off, prayer requests remain public and searchable.
Adding prayer requests to your website menu
To add a prayer requests page to your site navigation, go to Appearance → Menus in your dashboard. If you don’t see Prayer Requests as an option, click Screen Options at the top right and tick Prayer Requests.
Expand the Prayer Requests panel on the left, click View All, tick All Prayer Requests, then click Add to Menu. Save the menu as usual and the link appears on your site, using your theme’s archive template.
Prayer requests in the app
Prayer requests are built into the Our Church app. App users can read published requests and submit their own — which, like website submissions, arrive as drafts for you to moderate before they go live. You can enable the prayer page on the app menu by editing the menu.