Lifted Prayer

Your home for prayer. Share requests with your family, small group, or church, pray the moment it matters, and celebrate together when prayers are answered.

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Inspiration

Technology has transformed almost every aspect of how we communicate. We have platforms for sharing photos, life updates, career milestones, and opinions. But when it comes to prayer, we still rely on scraps of paper, the back of a church bulletin, group texts, or social media posts that quickly disappear as new content takes their place.

Prayer requests deserve better.

Lifted Prayer was created to give prayer a home — a place where requests can be shared, remembered, and revisited. A place where updates can be posted, encouragement can be offered, and people can faithfully pray for one another without requests getting buried or forgotten.

My hope is that Lifted Prayer helps individuals, families, small groups, and churches stay connected through prayer, making it easier to carry one another’s burdens every day.

What it does

Lifted Prayer is a platform for individuals, families, and churches to keep and share prayer requests.

Users can:

  • Create personal or shared prayer requests
  • Pray for and encourage others
  • Post updates and celebrate answered prayers
  • Organize requests into groups and communities
  • Follow the people and requests that matter most
  • Keep requests private, share them with one small group or a whole church, post anonymously, or mark them urgent
  • Get push notifications for new requests that open straight to the request, so you can pray right away
  • See Group Insights: active members, prayer trends, time to first prayer, answered prayers, and the request no one has prayed for yet
  • Customize the experience with Display Preferences
  • Use the app in 17 languages: English, Filipino, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Simplified Chinese, Spanish, Swahili, and Ukrainian

Lifted Prayer is free for every user, and every feature is included in every plan. Communities only pay if they need more groups or members.

The goal isn’t simply to record prayer requests, but also to help people consistently pray for one another.

How I built it

Lifted Prayer is built with a Ruby on Rails backend and native iOS and Android apps powered by Hotwire Native. I chose Rails because it allows me to move quickly while maintaining a clean architecture, and Hotwire Native lets me share much of the application experience across the web and mobile platforms.

The application also includes:

  • A custom permissions system for families, groups, and churches
  • Push notifications
  • Secure authentication
  • Community management
  • Subscription support for church organizations

Challenges I ran into

The biggest surprise was how much work it took to make the experience feel truly native across the web, iOS, and Android.

Hotwire Native dramatically reduced the amount of duplicated code, but getting navigation, page transitions, deep linking, native buttons, authentication, and platform-specific behaviors to feel seamless across all three platforms took far more effort than I expected.

Another major challenge was designing permissions. Prayer requests are deeply personal, so I wanted users to have complete control over who could see each request while still giving church and group leaders the tools they need to manage their communities. It took several iterations of the data model before I found an approach that balanced privacy with usability.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

The biggest accomplishment is simply finishing something I’ve envisioned for a long time.

Lifted Prayer grew from an idea into a polished product with web, iOS, and Android support. Seeing people create their first prayer requests and communities has made all of the late nights worthwhile.

Early traction

Since launch, 40 people have joined Lifted Prayer, shared 114 prayer requests, and prayed 968 times — about 8.5 prayers for every request. They've created 7 communities, and one church has already upgraded to the annual Growth plan.

What I learned

Building software always takes longer than expected.

I also learned that great products are less about adding features and more about relentlessly refining the experience. Every screen, every workflow, and every interaction matters.

Finally, I was reminded that shipping is more valuable than endlessly polishing and that the best feedback comes from real users. My first users have already shaped the product: Group Insights and Display Preferences both came directly from their requests.

What's next for Lifted Prayer

This hackathon marks the public launch of Lifted Prayer.

My focus now is listening to users, improving the experience, and helping more families, small groups, and churches stay connected through prayer.

Long term, I hope Lifted Prayer becomes the place people naturally think of when they want to keep, share, and pray over the requests that matter most.

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