Church Admin Guide
Everything pastors and administrators need to set up and run a church community on PrayerJar.
What does this cost?
Nothing. There is one version of PrayerJar and your church already has all of it — no plan to choose, no cap on members or groups, and no card to enter. Some of what is described below is still being built; where that is true, this guide says so.
How to Set Up Your Church
4 steps to launch your congregation on PrayerJar
Create Profile
Sign in and run the setup wizard at /church/create
Get Your URL
Share your unique /church/[slug] link with members
Invite Members
Send invite links or add emails from the Team tab
Assign Roles
Set Admin, Pastor, and Member permissions
Setting Up Your Church
Get your church live in under 10 minutes.
Create your church profile
Sign in, then go to /church/create. Walk through the setup wizard: enter your church name, denomination (optional), and a welcome message that members see when they join.
Your church URL
Your church gets a unique slug (e.g. /church/grace-community). Share this link with your congregation to let them join.
Invite members
From your church dashboard → Team, generate an invite link or add members by email. Members can also discover your church via the Find a Church directory.
Assign roles
Roles: Admin (full access), Pastor (can view the pastoral dashboard, add notes, make assignments), Member (joins the church and appears on your roster; posting to a private church wall is not available yet).
Private Prayer Wall (coming soon)
Built, but nothing can reach it yet.
Not available yet
The wall page is built and visible only to members, but a prayer is not attached to a church when it is submitted — so nothing ever lands on it. It shows an empty state for every church. We are fixing the submission path before we count this as shipped.
What it will be
Your church's private prayer wall, visible only to members, who submit requests directly to it — separate from the public community feed.
Where it lives
Members navigate to /church/[your-slug]/wall. It is also linked from their profile once they join your church.
Custom branding
Upload your church logo and set accent colors in Settings → Branding. The private wall will display your branding instead of the default PrayerJar look once the wall itself is reachable.
Pastoral Dashboard
Pastoral notes and assignments, kept where your care team can read them.
Overview
The pastoral dashboard is where admins and pastors keep notes and assignments. It shows your member count and your open follow-ups, both real. Two further counters — active requests and pending flags — read from a church link that is not written yet, so they always showed zero; those tiles have been taken off the page until they can count something.
Pastoral notes
Notes are visible only to admins and pastors — never to the member who submitted the request. Use them for internal follow-up context.
Assignments
Assign a request to a specific pastor or leader. They receive a notification and the request appears in their assignment queue.
Church Groups (coming soon)
Members can start groups today. Attaching them to your church is not built yet.
Not available yet
A group is not attached to a church when it is created, so your church Groups page is empty. There is no cap on how many groups your church can have.
What works today
Any member can start a prayer group and share its invite code, and requests posted to that group stay inside it. Those groups just are not owned by your church — you cannot see or administer them from the church dashboard.
What it will be
Groups you organize around sub-communities of your congregation — Women's Ministry, Youth Group, Small Group 4 — created from the church dashboard and visible to your admins.
Live Event Prayer Wall (coming soon)
Every part is built except the one that starts an event.
Not available yet
There is no screen for creating an event, and no Create Event button anywhere — the events page says so plainly. Until an event can be created, nothing in the rest of this section can be reached.
What it will be
A real-time, projected prayer wall for worship services, conferences, retreats, or prayer meetings. Attendees submit prayers from their phones; a moderator approves them before they appear on screen.
Sharing the submission link
Attendees visit a short URL (shown in the event setup) on their phones to submit prayers. No PrayerJar account required.
Moderating submissions
Open the moderation view on a separate device. New submissions appear in real-time. Approve to display them on the wall, or dismiss inappropriate content.
The display screen
Open the display mode (/church/[slug]/events/[id]/wall) on the projected screen. Approved prayers scroll automatically. Your branding is applied.
After the event
Download a CSV report of all prayers submitted. The report is useful for follow-up pastoral care.
Analytics (not available yet)
The page is switched off until the charts can tell the truth.
The page is off right now
Church dashboard → Analytics returns a not-found page, and the link has been taken out of the sidebar. This is deliberate.
Why
Prayer volume over time, engagement, category breakdown and answered prayer rate all read from a church link that is not written when a prayer is submitted. All four drew a flat zero for every church. A chart reporting that your congregation prayed nothing is a false statement about your church, so the page is off rather than misleading.
What was real
Member growth over time. That chart reads church membership, which is recorded correctly, and it comes back with the rest.
Downloadable reports
There is no analytics export of any kind yet. Reports for elder board updates and annual reports are not available.
Church Directory Listing
Get discovered by people looking for a church near them.
Getting listed
PrayerJar's Find a Church directory uses Google Places data. If your church is on Google Maps, it can be found in the directory. Claim your listing to manage it.
Claiming your listing
Search for your church in the directory, click "Claim this church," and follow the verification steps. Once verified, you can edit your description and contact info.
Why it matters
People using the Know Jesus pathway or searching for a local church in PrayerJar will find you. A claimed listing shows you are active on the platform.
Giving
Nothing to pay. Gifts are voluntary.
There is nothing to buy
Your church is not billed for PrayerJar, and there is no plan to pick or renew. If you find a screen that asks you to pay for a church feature, that is a bug — tell us at hello@prayerjar.org.
Giving to PrayerJar
If you want to support the work, /give takes a one-off gift. It is entirely optional and changes nothing about what your church can do.
Your giving history
Past gifts are listed on the Giving page at /billing. It is currently visible to church admins and pastors only.
Have a question not covered here?
Email hello@prayerjar.org and we’ll respond within one business day.