Prayer

We believe prayer is the backbone of any Christian ministry. Klemi doesn’t pray for you 😉 but she can help you to organise the information that you’d like your people to pray for. Over time we’ve realised this also becomes a vital channel of communication  – and what a great way to communicate – whatever your congregation members read in your prayer diary, they are probably reading on their knees! With that in mind it’s worth working at keeping it up to date. That’s where Klemi comes in. Klemi enables you to create any number of prayer feeds. A prayer feed is a collection of prayer items each of which is scheduled. The end product is similar to a prayer diary that a missionary, parachurch organisation or church might publish. Klemi’s prayer feeds can be published in a variety of formats: public calendar, print, web and a prayermate-compatible export.

Prayer Items

The building block of prayer feeds are prayer items. Prayer items have a title, a description and a number of additional fields that allow you to build Klemi’s existing data into them automatically.  For example you might create a prayer Item called “Smith Homegroup” and associate the “Smith Homegroup” (a group that you have already created on Klemi) to it. When this prayer item appears, the description will include a list of all those in that group. The benefit is that when you change the membership of the group, your prayer diary will be updated automagically as well. Prayer Items can also be tagged to allow efficient sorting and searching.

When you add multiple roles to a prayer item, Klemi has a guess at sorting them for you to make them print more sensibly. Roles with names containing “i/c” or “chair” come first, those with “lead” or “treasurer” next, those with “secretary” next, those with “member” last, and all the others just before them.

Prayer Feeds

Prayer feeds are a means of organising and scheduling prayer items. A prayer feed can have any number of prayer items and any prayer item can appear on a number of prayer feeds.  The most obvious type of prayer feed is something like a church prayer diary, but you can use the concept in various ways – it could be a way of scheduling items for prayer at your monthly church prayer meeting, or you might use it to make a calendar of items to pray for each Sunday to make sure all your mission partners are covered throughout the year.

Getting Started

The scheduling for prayer feeds works by integrating with google calendar. You’ll need to do the following in this order:

  • Create a new google calendar
  • Get the google calendar id. It’s a pseudo-email – so it looks like an email. Regular calendar IDs are something like asdfg@groups.calendar.google.com. If you’re using Gsuite, it will look more like a regular email address.
  • Give Klemi access to that calendar
    • Go into klemi settings
    • Find the service account details
    • Copy the email from there – something like mychurch@somethingorother.iam.gserviceaccount.com.
    • Go to the sharing settings in Google calendar and give ‘change events’ permission to that email account
    • NB if you’re using Gsuite you need to ensure that your gsuite calendars can be accessed and edited by accounts outside your organisation:You’ll need to log in to your Google Admin account and then go to Apps > Calendar. Go to General Settings, and allow managing of calendars.

      External sharing options for secondary calendars

  • Drop the google calendar id into the relevant field of your feed on Klemi
  • Hey presto! – It should work.

When you add the calendar’s identifier to a prayer feed, you can schedule prayer items using Google’s calendar interface. This allows you to set all sorts of custom recurrence rules as you would for any event, if that’s how your prayer diary rolls ;-).

Go to “Prayer > Prayer Items” and start adding prayer items to your feed. Use the search bar to help you if you’ve got a lot.

Auto updating

If you click “auto update” under “Prayer feeds” the Klemi will stay in sync with the corresponding calendar and vice versa. As a rule, if there’s a conflict, Klemi will pull scheduling information from google, and push description and title information to google.

Export

At the bottom of the prayer feed page you’ve got the option to export.

PDF output

You only have 5 pdf conversions per month, so use the ‘test’ setting until you’re happy with the output.

Prayermate output

Klemi will create a csv export file that collects all the prayer items on a feed and transforms it into a daily prayer list that you can then import into prayermate. If you haven’t come across prayermate.net, you need to have a look!

Publishing a Prayer Diary – Suggested Workflow

  1. Choose your prayer feed.
  2. Send out the public link to congregation members -> they input any information that they’d like to be prayed for. You can find the public link in the prayer feeds listing.
  3. Add any additional one off items  (e.g. church events)  to your prayer feed calendar using Google Calendar – this will be pulled into klemi when you sync.
  4. Verify group and role information on the trellis is up to date.
  5. Export.