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Churches Use Technology
to Manage Prayer Requests, Hospital Visits

By Brant Mills

Chapelwood UMC has taken to heart the instructions given to the early church in Colossians 4:2 – devote yourselves to prayer, being watchful and thankful.

The church’s thriving prayer ministry called for the creation of “Iprayerworks” – a program designed by Toby Dagenhart, the Director of Communications at Chapelwood UMC. Iprayerworks was developed in his spare time out of the need to find a better way to manage Chapelwood’s prayer ministry. Dagenhart worked for months to build a program to replace their handwritten prayer cards.

According to Nancy Sterling, who works with the prayer ministry at Chapelwood, it has enabled them to do new things. “It's just absolutely amazing - really, night and day. There's just no comparison to what we had before.”

What they have now is a database-driven, web-based application that offers ministries a way to keep track of prayer requests, hospital visits, and visits to homebound persons. It is currently in use by two United Methodist churches as well as churches in other denominations and is available to others who might see a need for it.

First UMC in Downtown Houston just began using the system on January 14. Keitha West, who works with the First UMC prayer ministry, said it will help them cut administrative duties by 50 percent. “It simplifies the overall process and makes everything more efficient.”

How does it work?

Anyone can submit a prayer request to the system, which can be edited and posted by an administrator to ensure that privacy concerns are met. The prayer is then categorized and listed on the site – to which users can login with a password.

“We use it constantly to manage the prayer requests from [church] members and people from around the world… and to know that we have requests coming in from around the world – it’s just such a joy to touch lives that way,” Sterling said.

Intercessors, or prayer team members, can access the site 24 hours a day, seven days per week. They can then look through a list of recent prayer requests or search the system for specific people needing prayer.

Iprayerworks can also automatically send out prayer lists to groups of people at a specified day and time. “We’ve had over 100,000 prayers go through the system, and we’ll hit one million before long. Dagenhart noted.”

Another feature of the Iprayerworks system is its ability to manage hospital and home-bound visits. It has a listing of all hospitals in the Houston area and visitations can be kept track of – with the ability for clergy to enter notes about the visit or update relevant prayer requests. The visits are color coded so that clergy can see how long it has been since a person has received a visit, how often they are visited and who does the visiting.

Iprayerworks pricing varies based on the size of the church using it, and the initial setup fee runs from $250 to $1,500 with a monthly fee of $25 to $100. 

For more information about Iprayerworks, contact Toby Dagenhart at info@iprayerworks.com