People are struggling and do not know how to get help. Others have the time and the heart to pray and do not know who needs it. Still others would offer practical help if they knew a little more about what was going on.

In my experience most communities hold all three, and very little connects them. A request mentioned once at the end of a gathering is forgotten by the next week. A group text grows until people stop reading it. And the heaviest needs often go unsaid, because there is nowhere to say them without your name attached.

…I define community as a group of individuals who share a mutual concern for one another's welfare.

So PrayerAsks does a few specific things. You can ask named to everyone, named to your circle, to the facilitators only, or anonymously, and an anonymous ask is saved with no author, so no one can look up who wrote it.

The list is sorted by how few people have carried each ask. A new member's request sits above one the whole community already knows about. And when the date you named has passed, you are asked one question about what happened, and the answer goes back to everyone who carried it.

The care was in the community before any software. The list gives it somewhere to go.