Your church community feed

The community feed is your church's shared board, found at /community on your church's site. It mixes member posts, prayer requests, and announcements posted by the church itself into a single scrolling timeline. Old links to the prayer board still work — they now forward visitors straight to the community feed.

The community feed mixes posts and prayer requests in one timeline

Who can read it

The feed is public by default. Anyone can open it, including people who have never signed in — that is deliberate, so someone considering your church can see what life there is actually like before they ever create an account.

There are three levels of access, and reading is not the same question as posting:

Signed-out visitors and non-members see only the posts and prayer requests marked public.
Church members, of any age, see everything — including posts a member chose to keep inside the church.
Eligible adult members — 18 or older, and not currently restricted from posting — can also write, comment, react, and follow. A member who is under 18, or whose posting access was restricted by a moderator, can still read the entire feed; they just can't take part in it.

Warning

The community feed shares its public visibility with your website's Pray page. If you unpublish Pray from your website editor, the entire community feed — not just prayer requests — becomes unreachable for everyone, including you. Republish Pray to bring the feed back.

Who can post, and what

Posting a message — as opposed to a prayer request — requires an eligible adult member. Members can choose from five post types: Share, Praise, Need a hand, Question, and Moment. These publish immediately — there is no approval queue for ordinary posts.

Write the post

From the community feed, type into the box at the top and pick a post type.

Choose who sees it

The line under the box states the post's current reach in plain words. Posts are public by default; turn on Keep private to limit the post to signed-in church members only.

Post it

The post appears in the feed right away — for public posts, that includes signed-out visitors.

Tip

The reach is stated at rest, not hidden behind an icon, because a member who never touches the visibility control is still publishing to the open internet by default. Encourage members to check that line before posting anything they'd rather keep inside the church.

Prayer requests work differently

Submitting a prayer request has a much lower bar than posting: anyone can submit one, signed in or not, and a submitter can choose to stay anonymous. The tradeoff is that every prayer request needs a moderator's approval before it appears on the feed — including a request from your own staff. Approval is a rule about prayer requests as a content type, not a judgment about who submitted one.

A request submitted anonymously shows simply as Anonymous to everyone, including moderators reviewing it — the submitter's identity is masked on the server before it ever reaches a screen.
A request submitted by a guest (someone without an account) shows the display name that guest chose when they submitted it.

Reviewing reports and prayer requests

Moderation lives on one screen: Community under your admin dashboard. It has two tabs — Reports and Prayer approvals — so a moderator only has to check one place. The old, separate prayer moderation page now forwards here automatically.

Open Prayer approvals

Every pending prayer request is listed with its text and whether the submitter chose to stay anonymous. Click Approve to publish it to the feed, or Reject.

Give a reason when rejecting

Rejecting a prayer request requires typing a reason first — there is no reject without one. Confirm to finish.

Open Reports for flagged posts and comments

This tab lists posts and comments members have reported. From here a moderator can remove or restore content, lock a post to stop new comments, dismiss or resolve a report, or restrict a member's posting access if the reports keep coming from the same person.

Note

The Community moderation screen also has a shortcut to post as the church — the same official, always-public announcements you see pinned at the top of the feed.

Permissions

Reviewing prayer requests and reported content on the Community screen requires the members.message permission, or organization admin access.