Handling Prayer Requests

With everything my family and I been dealing with regarding my mother the past few weeks, I've spent a lot of time sending out prayer requests and e-mails, as well as time on the phone, to keep everyone up to date. Normally, I'm not a big prayer request kind of person (I may ask friends to pray for certain things, but not too many "public" requests), so this experience has made me think more about the process of receiving and distriuting prayer requests.

In my church, we have a special e-mail address for incoming prayer requests that one volunteer checks, and then they send out requests to a distribution list for the congregation. It works fairly well, but does involve some manual intervention to get the requests out. If that volunteer forgets, a prayer request may not go out soon enough.

So, I guess I've had the following thoughts and questions regarding prayer requests:

• How does your church handle prayer requests?
• What's the most effective way to reach a large percentage of your congregation in a short amount of time? Typical options include e-mails, a website announcement and phone-chains.
• Should someone moderate/filter prayer requests (so that requests like "I just burned my toast and I know it's going to be a long day because of it, so please pray for me today" don't need get through), do you just let everything through, or do you trust your members to use their best judgement?
• Would you feel comforable having your prayer requests posted in a church forum or on the website for all to see, or do you keep them to an "inner circle"?
• I think that if prayer requests are very public, some people may be less likely to ask for prayer because they are more private people.
• However, this greater transparency allows congregation members to get to know one another (strengths and weaknesses) at a deeper level, which should be good for the church as a whole.