When recording prayer needs in an app like PrayerMate, the things you want to pray for are often somewhat sensitive in nature. That’s why PrayerMate for iOS has long had a PIN protection feature, and many of you have been asking me to add this to the Android version as well. Today I’m pleased to announce that PrayerMate on both platforms now has the same password entry feature – you’ll find it under the Advanced Settings menu. Create a four digit numeric PIN, and nobody will be able to access your prayer points without first entering the code.

Many thanks to Dave Bignell who did most of the hard work for this feature shortly before last month’s Crowdfunding campaign. Since then he’s been working full time implementing automatic syncing to the Android app, and has been making fantastic progress. Look forward to further news on this in the new year.

The goal of the PrayerMate app has always been to help people pray more widely and more faithfully for the things that matter to them. Today I’m pleased to announce some new downloadable prayers in the PrayerMate prayer gallery for two important aspects of church life: 5 ways to pray for your pastor and 5 ways to pray for your church family.

To access this content within the free PrayerMate app, press the cog button and scroll down to the “Download prayers” option under the “Extra prayer content” section. You’ll find the new Ligonier content under the “Praying for your church” section. Hit the “Download all” button and choose which of your categories you wish to download into – perhaps “My church”. You’ll then be given one prayer each time you start a new session.

Today I’m pleased to announce a long-overdue feature on the PrayerMate Publishing Platform ideal for smaller publishers: prayer newsletters.

Until now, the PrayerMate Publishing Platform has only formally supported prayer calendars – a particular prayer point scheduled for each day, and subscribers only pray for that item if they open the app on that specific day. With prayer newsletters you can schedule new content as and when it’s available, and subscribers will see that same content until new content is scheduled. This is ideal for smaller organisations or individuals, if you don’t have enough content to schedule something unique for every single day.

Just like with all PrayerMate prayer diaries, you can then submit your prayer newsletter to the PrayerMate feed gallery and people can then easily subscribe to all of your updates on their mobile device through the free PrayerMate app.

Creating a prayer newsletter

After logging in to the PrayerMate Publishing Platform, you can create a new prayer newsletter by pressing “Create prayer diary”:

You will then be asked to select the style of your prayer diary – choose “newsletter”:

Note: if you have an existing prayer diary connected to a feed, open it up and click “Edit settings” in the right sidebar to change the style of your prayer diary

Scheduling content

When viewing your prayer newsletter, you can schedule content at the top. If you leave the date blank then it will just schedule it to appear immediately:

Note that prayer points will replace anything published on an earlier date. You can have multiple items scheduled on the same date, but otherwise content will stay live only until the date of the next prayer point. This means that you can schedule content in advance that will become live only when that date comes around.

Creating a fixed pool of prayer points

If your prayer needs are fairly fixed and you don’t need to reguarly publish new prayer points, you can also use prayer newsletters to create a fixed “pool” of prayer points that just rotates every time people pray for you. For example, you could schedule ten prayer points all on the same day, then the first time somebody prays for you they’ll see the first prayer point, the next time they pray they’ll see the second and so on (though this does depend slightly upon the exact settings they have in their app and the number of “items per session” they enabled).

Archiving content

Once you publish a prayer point, it will stay live indefinitely until there is some new content to replace it. Occasionally this is not the behaviour you want, and you just want to “archive” a prayer point without replacing it with something new. When viewing your newsletter, you’ll see an “Archive selected” button to do exactly this:

More info

I hope this new feature proves useful in getting more people praying for you. If you ever have any questions or feedback, do drop me an email – you should have got an email from me when you first signed up with my address.