Since PrayerMate launched over 15 years ago, we’ve had the great privilege of supporting you in praying over 100 million prayers. And one of the most exciting things about that is thinking of all the ways, big and small, that God has been at work in answering those prayers. That’s why we’re really excited by our new version 10 update, with new functionality to help you capture and look back with thankfulness on answers to prayer in your own life.
1. Encouragements
Answers to prayer come in all sorts of shapes and sizes, and we don’t want to think of prayer as simply a shopping list of requests to cross off when they’re answers. So we wanted to find a way to help you mark those encouragements, even in the midst of difficult, uncertain situations, to help you keep on giving thanks in all circumstances.
So in the new version of PrayerMate, you’ll be able to label items as encouragements. When creating or editing a card, just tap ‘Label’, and then select ‘Encouragement.’
You can view all the encouragements you’ve recorded in one place, on a new ‘encouragements’ tab on the home page — look for the praise hands icon at the top of your lists! And most excitingly, you can even start a ’praise session’ to scroll through these one after enough, to look back on all the ways God has been at work, big and small. We hope this will help you build rhythms of reflection and thanksgiving into your prayer life.
We’ve also improved how we display updates to cards, to make it easier and more satisfying to look back at the history of subjects you’ve been praying for.
2. Urgent cards
Sometimes things come along that you want to be praying for more regularly in the short term, and that’s why we’re also letting you label cards as urgent.
These cards show up on a special urgent cards slide in your prayer sessions, so that as well as your regular prayer subjects, you can keep praying for things that need more immediate, ongoing intercession. If a card is no longer urgent, just tap it and select ‘Remove urgent label’. Again, you can review all of these from the ‘urgent’ tab on the home page.
If you don’t want to see these cards in your prayer sessions, you can easily disable this by going to the ‘Prayer sessions’ page in the settings.
3. Inbox
Finally, we know that sometimes you have things to pray about that don’t quite fit into any of your existing subjects, and aren’t quite big enough for a subject of their own. Or maybe you have someone standing in front of you asking for prayer, and you just want a quick way to capture it without giving too much attention to your phone in that moment.
That’s what the new Inbox is for. Now you can create prayer items that aren’t attached to a subject, and then later you can go back and file them when you have time. When you create a card, you now have the choice to select ‘Add to inbox’ rather than picking a specific subject. The inbox lives at the top of your lists page, next to the encouragements and urgent tabs, and you can also add cards to it directly from there.
We’ve found that the inbox works especially well when paired with the new urgent label, when you get a short term, important prayer request about a situation outside your regular prayer subjects.
And as well as all this, we’ve added a number of small tweaks and improvements addressing some common feature requests:
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share text to PrayerMate from other apps by selecting it, tapping ‘Share’, and selecting PrayerMate from the list
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View all your event reminders in one place on the home page
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A better, streamlined interface for creating, editing, and updating cards
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New cards now go at the top of the list, not the bottom!
We know changes to an app you use regularly can be frustrating and disruptive, so we’ve designed nearly all of these new features to be completely optional. But we hope that for many of you, these additions to PrayerMate will help you to pray even more faithfully for people and things you care about, and look back with thankfulness on the ways God has been at work in your life.
This is all part of Discipleship Tech's mission of using technology to help people grow in their relationship with Jesus. As ever, this new update has been made possible in large part due to user donations and we thank God for your generosity.