Prayer categories, archiving, printing and more

The prayers feature in Church Social just got a bunch of improvements!

Prayer categories

First, we've added the ability to organize prayer requests into categories. For example, you can add categories for congregational concerns, political matters, mission and outreach efforts, etc. Only administrators and prayer editors are able to create categories, but anyone who can create new prayers can assign a prayer to one of the existing categories.

Archiving prayers

We've added the ability to archive prayer requests. This is helpful when a prayer has been answered and no longer needs to appear in the prayer list. If you'd like to find an archived prayer request, you can choose to show archived prayers from the new filters dropdown.

Printing prayers

You can now print prayers, which can be helpful when organizing prayer meetings. From the prayers page, click the three-dot dropdown menu and choose the "Print" option. The print feature will respect your current filtering and search criteria, so you can limit what prayers are printed — for example, only those in a particular category.

Prayer editors and permissions

We've updated the permissions to follow the new tier-based approach that we've been implementing elsewhere (eg. calendar permissions). This allows you to specify the minimum access level a user must have in order to create new prayer requests.

Finally, we've added a new "Prayer Editor" role that can be assigned to any member in your church with an active account. Prayer editors have full access to create, edit, and delete all prayer requests, regardless of who created them. And, as already mentioned, they can also manage the prayer categories.

If your church isn't using the prayers feature yet, you can enable it on the prayers settings page (available to your Church Social administrator). It's a really great way to help your members remember important matters in their prayers.