Who Actually Sees a Prayer Request?

This is usually the first real question, and it’s usually asked a little carefully — because the honest version of it is “will this embarrass someone.” So here is the honest, specific answer.

When someone submits a request through Lifted Prayers, the very first thing that happens is nothing. It doesn’t appear anywhere. It sits in a moderation queue that only people with the lifted_prayers_manage_requests capability on your site can see — in practice, whoever you’ve assigned to your care or moderation team. No one else on staff, and certainly no one in the congregation, has any visibility into it yet.

The person submitting makes the next call, not the software. At the point of writing the request, they choose how it can be shared: kept with the care team only, shared publicly but anonymously, or shared publicly with their name attached. That choice belongs to them, and the default — if someone doesn’t actively choose otherwise — is the most private option, not the most public one. Private by default, not by exception, as we like to put it, because a default is what most people never think to change, and it should never be the one that surprises them later.

A member of the care team then reviews the request before anything happens to it. This is the step that stops a raw, unfiltered message from a difficult moment in someone’s life from landing straight in front of the whole church. The moderator reads it, decides whether it’s ready to be shared at the level the person requested, and can adjust course — keep something team-only even if it was marked shareable, for instance, if it clearly needs a private conversation first rather than public visibility.

Only after that review does anything reach a prayer wall, and even then, only what the requester agreed to share and the moderator approved appears there — anonymously or by name, exactly as chosen. Nothing on the wall shows contact details, and nothing about who’s praying for a request is visible to the person who submitted it in a way that could feel like being watched.

The short version: three checkpoints — the submitter’s own choice, a human review, and a deliberate publish step — stand between a prayer request and anyone else seeing it. None of them are optional, and none of them can be skipped by a setting you forgot was on.