PrayerKeep - A Better way of Sharing Prayer Requests
Churches share prayer requests on a weekly basis but there is no easy way to organize them, Prayer Keep is supposed to be that tool every church needs to effectively share prayer requests.
As member of a prayer team, we always need to share prayer points and topics with each other. Each week we have the areas we wanted to pray about and for every service we have to as well prepare a list of request that need’s to be prayed about. This meant that every week we had to write out prayer points and likewise share them with each other. To achieve this we always send them in our whatsapp or facebook group. This seems okay until you need to gather all the prayer request (with bible verses) into one place when it was time to pray.
In cases where we needed to just prepare for prayer meetings, we individually waited on God to know what He wanted us to pray about, we then write that in our notebooks, find bible verses that can help us in praying those requests and then when we are leading the prayer, find the page in our notebook where we wrote it down and then open the bible on every prayer point - if you have lead a prayer meeting, you’d understand this. If you as well need to share this prayer point with a larger audience, one common way now is to type them in a document and then make a screenshot or have them in a PDF. An example to show how it is currently done. A popular prayer meeting held on instagram live called
shared a list of their prayer points in form of an image for one of the prayer sessions on Nov 3, 2020.
The various ways described above, have a number of challenges, some of which are:
You’d have to open the bible everytime you wanted to pray about something.
Find where in your notebook you wrote those prayer points for that prayer meeting or where that PDF was downloaded in your phone.
Write down from the whatsapp group each prayer request sent in by other team mates in your notebook weekly and many others.
Introducing PrayerKeep
My task was to build a website or a mobile app that made it as easy as possible to create a group of prayer requests for a certain event and share it with a group of people. People should be able to save it in the app, can comment on individual prayer requests and as well share it with other people. When it’s time to pray, every bible verse I attached should be shown directly in the app without a need of flipping to that passage in the bible.
I have spent several months iterating on the user interface (UI) and the user experience (UX) to make it what it is today. To help people understand the use case I took the prayer points in the
, hit the join button, create an account and you have all these prayer points saved in your account. If you needed to pray, you have the bible verse directly beneath the prayer point and you don’t need to open the bible just to pray along.
I made this decision for speed of development (as on the web, Google nor Apple do not need to approve my changes before it gets to my users like they do in their various stores), like wise the ability to reach more people both on mobile and desktop, I have decided to make it a website. I am very aware of the benefits of mobile applications with features such as push notifications, access to phone contact, offline support, installation on the home screen and many more which this app would benefit greatly from. Thanks to the advancement on the web, you can now build websites that can be install-able on the home screen, send push notification (this has it’s challenges which works on some devices), offline support etc. Allowing me to leverage all these benefits in bringing this idea to life.
Conclusion
Sharing a list of prayer request solves my prayer team’s need and I believe that several churches and prayer teams around the world who share prayer requests often would benefit from this web app. You might ask yourself, When do I need this app? For now the answer to this question is anytime you need to organize and/or share prayer request(s) with several people or just use for your personal purpose.
I’d highly appreciate feedback from you, share with me what you think about the app, how you’d want to use it or what you wish exists in the app.