The church is a community and family that grows through faith, kindness, and love. Praying together allows the church to show one another love and kindness by bearing each other’s burdens.

Prayer request forms allow people to submit their prayers to the church and the church prays and hopes with them. Having an online prayer request form creates a central location to collect all prayer requests and ensures you don’t miss or overlook any prayer request.

Understanding Prayer Requests

Prayer requests are people’s heartfelt desires that they submit to the church for support and intercession through prayer. Some churches have a dedicated follow-up unit that prays these requests, while some have an intercessory prayer session during service where the church collectively prays these prayers.

Why Prayer Requests?

People know what they want to pray about, so they can write out their requests. Why should you still collect prayer requests? Well, here are some of the top reasons why:

• Building Community: When members pray together they share one another’s burdens, a sense of shared purpose, and responsibility towards one another. Also, people knowing that others are praying for them brings a sense of comfort and strength.
• Personal Benefits: Prayers make people feel heard and understood and can also help them face difficult situations. Also, the point of prayers is not just to make requests, is for those requests to be answered. People’s prayers get answered when they are prayed for, which brings joy, and fulfillment, as well as strengthens their faith.

Most Common Prayer Requests

We make prayer requests for different reasons but here are the most common requests people submit:

• Health Concerns: Prayer requests for healing and strength for illnesses and injuries.
• Life Challenges: Prayer to find the strength to pull through difficult times and, such as job loss, family issues, or emotional struggles.
• Significant Life Events: Prayer requests for the success of important milestones like weddings, graduations, or the birth of a child.

Creating an Effective Prayer Request Form

Here are the major sections your prayer request form should contain

Essential Components of a Prayer Request Form

• Contact Information: name, email address, and phone number (optional). This helps you contact the people who submitted their requests and let them know you are praying for them.
• Request Details: Provide a clear space for people to describe their prayer needs. Having only a multiple-choice prayer request form won’t allow people to specify what they want in detail.
  • Consider offering a text box with a character limit to encourage concise communication.
• Confidentiality Preferences: People may have sensitive requests; respect their privacy by offering options to anonymously share their requests.
• Follow-up: Let requestors know how they can receive updates on their request or access additional support resources such as a prayer plan, community, counseling sessions, etc.

Best Practices for Designing a Prayer Request Form

Here are the best practices to ensure your prayer request forms are easy to fill out:

• Simplicity: The primary goal of prayer request forms is to collect prayer requests; it shouldn’t be overly complicated. Keep the form length short and use clear language to ensure people of different demographics can easily fill out the form.
• Ensuring Clarity and Sensitivity in Language: Use respectful language and avoid technical jargon that might exclude certain audiences.
• Providing Options for Different Types of Prayer Requests: You will most likely receive a lot of requests as a church. Having different options to categorize requests (e.g., urgent, ongoing, health concerns, relationships) helps you organize and prioritize requests.
• Incorporating Digital and Physical Formats: Make your accessible online and in print. For example, you can add a bar code to your flyer design, or welcome package. You could also share physical copies with members directly or keep copies at your help desk.

Digital Prayer Request Forms

Physical prayer request forms are good, but what’s even better is a digital one. Having an online form helps you organize your prayer requests way more easily and allows people to submit their requests even when they are not in church. Let’s look at some of the benefits of using a digital prayer request form:

Benefits of Digital Prayer Request Forms

• Accessibility:  Using a digital form allows members to submit their prayer requests 24/7. It allows members to fill out the prayer request form from anywhere as long as they have an internet connection. Some people wouldn’t be able to attend services in person due to illness, work schedules, or other commitments, but an online form still allows them to submit their requests.
• Easy Organization and Management: With physical prayer request forms or cards, one simple mistake of dropping the request forms in a different location could mean them getting overlooked.  But with online forms, you can categorize, track, and use them to create a comprehensive prayer chain or bulletin.
• Wider Audience: You can share the prayer request form on the church website, social media platforms, website content, and even through email lists. This allows you to reach a wider audience including people outside the immediate congregation.

Tools and Platforms for Creating Digital Prayer Request Forms

Here’s a breakdown of the tools you need to create a digital prayer request platform:

• Form Builder: You can use Formplus to easily create your prayer request form. You can also use the pre-designed prayer request form template. The template has all the questions you need and you can easily customize it with your desired fields.

Step-by-Step Guide to Create Your Prayer Request Form

Let’s get into how to create your prayer request form:

• Open the Prayer Request Form Template

• Edit the form to add more fields (optional)

• Save the form and go to settings to create an autoresponder to let members know their request has been received.

• Share the form with members by embedding it on your website. You can also share via social media platforms, or create a QR code people can scan.

How to Encourage Members to Fill Prayer Request Forms

Here are some tips to ensure people use and get the best experience using your prayer request forms:

Promote the Prayer Request Form: Announce the form and how you intend to use it during services. You can also add it to church newsletters and social media posts.  Another thing you should do is assure members their requests are confidential.

Regular Updates: Regularly review and update the form based on feedback, and let the congregation know about the changes and updates.

Conclusion

Prayer request forms help you build a praying church that cares deeply about one another to pray and intercede for one another. We hope this guide and our carefully designed template make creating your prayer request form easier and capture the needs of your church.