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Prayer Community

Prayer Community gives members a shared church prayer feed inside the mobile app. It turns prayer requests into a simple community rhythm: someone submits a need, the church reviews and approves it, members pray, and the requester can later mark the request answered with a testimony. This feature is church-scoped in the current release. Members see approved church requests and eligible Community Group requests, not a public global prayer wall. Leaders-only and pastoral-only requests stay out of member feeds.

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Where Members Find It

Members open Prayer Community from the Connect page by tapping Prayer community. From there, they can browse approved requests, submit a new request, mark that they prayed, return to their own requests for follow-up, or use a private prayer journal.

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What Members Can Do

• Submit a new prayer request from the mobile app.
• Choose the Church Prayer Wall, one of their active Community Groups, church leaders, or the authorized pastoral team as the request audience.
• Choose whether the request should appear anonymously.
• View approved requests shared by their church.
• Tap I prayed to show support for a request.
• See how many members have prayed for a request.
• Review their own submitted requests.
• Mark their own request as answered.
• Add optional testimony text when a prayer has been answered.
• Edit an active request and return it for review.
• Withdraw a request from member Prayer Walls.
• Filter the Prayer Wall between active and answered requests.
• Keep member-only journal prayers and private answered reflections.
• Copy a journal prayer into a moderated request when they want others to pray with them.
• Set daily, weekly, journal-specific, and prayed-request follow-up reminders.
• Open a verified prayer-team daily list and mark assignments praying or completed.
• Privately ask church leaders for urgent follow-up on an active request.
• Open a locked Prayer Room when staff arrange immediate live prayer with a verified prayer-team leader.

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Submitting a Prayer Request

Members use the Prayer Community submit flow when they want the church to pray with them. Typical steps:

1. Open Connect.
2. Tap Prayer community.
3. Open the submit request action.
4. Enter the request title and description.
5. Choose who can see the request.
6. Choose whether to submit anonymously.
7. Submit the request.

After submission, the request follows the church approval process before it appears in an eligible member feed. Editing an approved request also returns it for review. When a situation needs timely attention, the member can also ask leaders for urgent follow-up and include a short private reason. This signal and reason stay out of the Prayer Wall.

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Audience Choices

• Church Prayer Wall: approved requests can be seen by members of the church.
• Community Group: approved requests can be seen only by active members of the selected group.
• Church leaders only: the request stays out of member Prayer Walls.
• Pastoral team only: the request is encrypted and restricted to staff who have private pastoral prayer access.

Audience and anonymity are separate. For example, a member can share an anonymous request with their Community Group or a named request with leaders only.

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Private Pastoral Requests

Choose Pastoral team only when the prayer itself and the follow-up need a smaller confidentiality boundary than the general church-leader workflow. The member app explains this boundary before submission:

• The member’s identity is shared only with authorized pastoral caregivers so they can follow up safely.
• The private content is encrypted and access is recorded.
• The request does not appear on a Prayer Wall, in a prayer-team list or digest, in a Prayer Room, or in a general export.
• Staff exports contain workflow metadata only, not the prayer, identity, or contact details.
• After the request is answered, withdrawn, or rejected, the church keeps the encrypted content for its configured retention period and then removes it.

A request cannot be changed into or out of the pastoral audience after it is submitted. Create a new request when a different audience is needed.

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Approval and Moderation

Prayer Community uses the existing prayer request approval flow as the moderation gate. Approved requests appear in the church feed. Pending, rejected, or unreviewed requests stay out of the feed. This helps churches keep sensitive requests, duplicate submissions, or inappropriate content from becoming visible to the wider community. For admins and prayer teams, the practical workflow is:

1. Review incoming prayer requests.
2. Approve requests that are appropriate for the church feed.
3. Confirm that the selected audience is appropriate before approval.
4. Keep request status up to date so members see the right requests.

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Anonymous Requests

Prayer requests can be anonymous. When a request is anonymous, the feed hides the requester identity. This lets members ask for prayer without exposing personal details publicly. Non-anonymous requests can show the member or display name so the church can recognize who is asking. Use anonymous requests for sensitive needs, family situations, personal struggles, or any request where privacy matters.

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Praying for Requests

Members can tap I prayed on a request to show they prayed for it. Each member can mark I prayed once per request. The count helps the requester know that the church is standing with them, without requiring every person to leave a comment or message.

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My Requests

The member’s own requests are available for follow-up. This area helps request owners see what they submitted, track whether the request is still active, and mark it answered when the situation changes. Owners can also edit an active request or withdraw it. An edit returns an approved request to the review queue. Withdrawal removes it from member feeds without deleting the church’s follow-up record.

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Urgent Follow-Up

Members can ask for urgent follow-up while submitting a request or from My Requests. The member sees whether the request is awaiting review, approved, declined, being handled, or resolved. A pending urgency request can be cancelled. Urgent follow-up is a private request for the church’s ministry team; it is not an emergency service. Members facing immediate danger should contact the appropriate local emergency service. After a leader approves the request, staff can assign an owner, acknowledge the need, begin follow-up, and record resolution. If live prayer is appropriate, staff can create a locked Prayer Room for the member and a verified prayer-team leader. The member can open that room from their request.

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Prayer Room Connection Recovery

If a Prayer Room connection becomes unstable, the room displays Reconnecting... and temporarily pauses microphone, camera, and speaker controls. The member stays on the room screen while the app tries to restore the connection. If the connection cannot recover, the member sees Try connection again. This requests a fresh room session without making them leave and find the room again. If microphone access has been permanently denied, the app also offers a shortcut to the device settings where access can be restored. The room also shows the member’s own connection quality. Opening Connection help gives practical suggestions, including changing networks or reducing video data when bandwidth is limited. In a video room, choose Use audio only from Connection help to pause incoming video and turn off your camera while keeping prayer audio, chat, and room controls available. The app does not switch modes automatically. Choose Show video again when the connection improves. Incoming video can return, but your camera stays off until you deliberately turn it on. If you switch apps or the room moves into the background, TheFaithApp stops your microphone and camera from publishing. You remain in the room, and the app does not silently turn either control back on when you return. A clear message shows which controls stayed off so you can restore them when ready. If audio-only mode was active, incoming video remains paused after returning. Members can review and copy a support diagnostic when they need help. It contains only the room reference, audio or video mode, connection state and quality, participant count, retry count, whether audio-only mode is active, whether microphone or camera publishing was paused after leaving the app, and capture time. It does not contain the room title, prayer text, names, contact details, chat, recordings, device identifiers, or an access token, and the app does not upload it automatically.

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Answered Requests and Testimonies

Request owners can mark their own requests as answered. When they mark a request answered, they can add optional testimony text. This gives the church a simple way to celebrate answered prayer without creating a separate testimony workflow. Good testimony text is usually short, specific, and safe to share. Members should avoid including private details about other people unless they have permission.

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Private Prayer Journal

The Journal area is for prayers a member wants to keep completely private. Journal entries do not appear in the Prayer Wall, the staff prayer inbox, exports, prayer-team lists, or church analytics. Members can:

1. Add a title and private prayer or reflection.
2. Edit the entry as the situation changes.
3. Mark it answered and add an optional private reflection.
4. Return an answered entry to active when they want to keep praying.
5. Delete the entry and its reminder permanently.

When a member chooses Share request, Prayer Community copies the journal entry into a new request. The member still chooses an audience and whether to appear anonymously, and the copied request follows church review. The journal entry itself stays private and can be shared only once.

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Prayer Reminders

The reminder card at the top of Journal supports:

• A daily prayer time.
• A weekly prayer time on the member’s chosen day.
• A one-time reminder for a private journal entry.
• A one-time follow-up for a request the member owns or has marked I prayed.

Reminder delivery uses the time zone in the member’s communication preferences. One-time reminders turn off after delivery; daily and weekly rhythms continue until the member removes them. For privacy, push notifications use a general journal message instead of placing the private prayer description on the device lock screen. Tapping the notification opens Prayer Community.

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Prayer Teams

Church staff can open Prayer Teams in the dashboard to create teams from the church’s already verified prayer volunteers. Each roster member has a leader, coordinator, or intercessor role, an active or paused status, optional weekly availability, and an explicit weekly-email preference. The member app shows a prayer-team card only to active roster members whose prayer-volunteer profile remains verified. Opening it creates a stable daily list and lets the member mark each assignment as praying or completed. Daily lists use these privacy rules:

• Approved church requests can be added automatically.
• Leaders-only requests require a deliberate staff assignment.
• Community Group requests never enter a prayer-team list.
• Pastoral-only requests never enter a prayer-team list or digest.
• Anonymous requests stay anonymous.
• Team screens and emails do not include requester phone or email details.

The weekly digest is sent on the team’s configured local schedule to active, opted-in, still-verified roster members. Each recipient gets at most one delivery per team and week.

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Current Scope

Prayer Community currently focuses on the core church prayer loop:

• Member submission
• Church approval
• Approved church feed
• I prayed support
• Owner follow-up
• Answered requests
• Optional testimony text
• Anonymous display rules
• Church, Community Group, leaders-only, and pastoral-only audiences
• Owner editing with moderation review
• Owner withdrawal
• Active and answered Prayer Wall filters
• Member-private prayer journal with answered reflections
• One-time journal-to-request sharing through normal moderation
• Daily and weekly prayer rhythms
• Journal and prayed-request follow-up reminders
• Verified prayer-team rosters, roles, availability, and assignments
• Permission-safe daily prayer lists
• Weekly prayer-team email digests
• Private member-requested urgency with staff review
• Safe alerts to authorized church leaders
• Assigned urgent follow-up through acknowledgement, work, and resolution
• Bounded Pastoral Care handoffs that do not copy the prayer text
• Locked urgent Prayer Rooms with verified prayer-team leaders
• Encrypted pastoral-only requests with restricted access, access history, metadata-only export, and timed content removal

The following community expansion ideas are intentionally left for later phases:

• Public or global prayer walls