Prayer & pastoral care

Two ways your members reach out, deliberately kept separate. The prayer board is the church's shared space — requests, praises, "I prayed" — for members to pray for one another. Pastoral care is the private channel a member uses to reach your care team, and it runs through the member Inbox (see Community → Inbox), never the board.

The prayer board runs on the Prayer community module (Community settings). Turning the module off removes the prayer board for your members; the Inbox stays available, so a member can always reach staff privately.

How do members use the prayer board?

A member opens Prayer in their portal and writes a request. Before posting they pick one of three visibilities:

• Visible to members — the request appears on the board with their name on a church-tinted card. Other members see it and pray.
• Anonymous — the request appears on the board with the author hidden. Other members see "Anonymous" rather than a name. Anonymity is structural: the database masks the author's identity so it never reaches another member's device — only the author themselves and your pastoral staff see who wrote it.
• Pastoral only — the request does not appear on the board. It is routed privately to your pastoral staff and shows up in the admin Prayer review list, filtered to the pastoral requests.

Below a request, members tap "I prayed" (idempotent — one tap per request per member, no spam) and can leave a short encouragement. A member marks their own request answered to celebrate a praise, reopens it if needed, or archives it. A member can also follow a request to be notified about replies.

How do members reach a pastor privately?

Through the Inbox. A member opens Inbox in their portal, starts a new message, and writes to the care team. That opens a private pastoral thread — a one-on-one conversation between the member and your pastors. Nothing in it ever reaches the prayer board or other members. Pastoral threads land in your admin Community → Inbox, where a pastor replies. (The Inbox is the only member ↔ admin reply surface; see Community.)

How do I review and moderate prayer requests?

Open Community from the admin sidebar, then Prayer. The review list shows every request — board posts and pastoral-only ones — and you can filter by status (open / answered), visibility (members / anonymous / pastoral), kind (request / praise / urgent / testimony), and flags (open / dismissed / resolved). Open a request to act on it:

• Make pastoral-only (or restore it to the members board).
• Make anonymous to members (or reveal the author to members again).
• Mark answered (or mark it unanswered).
• Reach out to <first name> — opens a private pastoral thread with the author in your admin Inbox, so you can follow up one-on-one.
• Remove post — a soft delete that requires a reason. The reason is kept on the audit timeline and sent to the author so they understand why.
• Audit log — a pastoral-staff-only timeline of every event on the request (created, edited, visibility/status changes, hides, replies, reactions, and flags). Flag rows show the reason the reporter gave.

The author is notified when you remove their post or change its visibility, so moderation is never silent.

What if a member reports a request?

A Report action sits on every prayer card, on web and mobile, for anyone who isn't the author. A member opens it, writes a short reason, and the report lands in your Community → Moderation queue, where you review reports across prayer, group posts, and directory profiles. Reports are private to the reporter and admins; from the queue you can hide content pending review without deleting it. The author and church admins can still see a hidden row; other members stop seeing it.

Who sees what?

RLS enforces these rules on the database — the visibility is structural, not a render-time choice. Anonymous requests are masked server-side before they ever reach another member.