How an App Can Help Your Church Pray

It is so easy to become distracted from prayer by whatever else is going on in our lives. We want to read the latest news stories, watch the new binge-worthy series on Netflix, we are busy with family life, careers, or our endless Facebook feeds.

Let me recommend PrayerMate as a powerful tool in this battle.

Add this little yellow icon to the dock or home page of your smartphone and you will have a regular reminder to turn to God in prayer. As the PrayerMate website explains, this app “helps you organise your prayer life, know what to pray for, and actually pray”.

Here are three ways that PrayerMate can help you for the world, for the nation, for your church, for others, and for yourself.

Prayer lists

The app is based around prayer lists which can be pre-made by others or created from scratch by you.

For family, I have a list of names of those I want to pray for, each with notes of specific things to pray. For my church, I have a list titled ’18 things to pray for your church’, created by The Gospel Coalition, and can add other things.

There are lists that give new prayer points each day from organisations like UCCF, Open Doors, and UFM. There is even one from FIEC to give prayer points for different churches across the country.

I’m sure you can see how having these topics automatically update on your phone can be helpful, especially for those who use their phones often. It helps you remember who and what to pray for and informs you of new things to pray for.

Maybe you could encourage people to create their own prayer lists to regularly pray for loved ones, or to subscribe to feeds from different organisations that your church partners with.

Church prayer lists

You could go a step further and create your own church prayer list on PrayerMate. This could include recurring prayers that are general to the church, or you could add specific prayers each day to be sent to a member’s prayer list on the app.

Many churches produce prayer lists to help members pray for one another and pray for different church ministries – often in the form of a printed sheet or booklet. PrayerMate offers a digital solution to this task which automatically updates when your prayer list does, without the need to replace the out-of-date printed sheets.

You could make your church prayer feed public so that others can keep up to date with your prayer points - maybe former members or ministry partners.

The ability to create your own church prayer feed on PrayerMate is free for smaller churches, with a small subscription for more features. The team at PrayerMate are happy to help you through the process too.

Prayer groups

A new feature in the app is prayer groups. This allows a private group of app users to share private prayer requests with each other in the app.

Do your church’s small groups share prayer requests in a WhatsApp chat? This feature would help filter out the other (still important) conversation and focus on what prayer needs there are. Or maybe your leadership team want to pray for one another regularly. Prayer groups in PrayerMate allow up-to-date requests to be prayed for each time the app is used.

Individuals can set up these groups, or you could create them as a church to empower your small groups and ministries to pray intentionally for one another.