When I built the prayer list feature, the thing I was most worried about wasn't the technical part. It was making something that felt like a form instead of a form of care.
There's a real risk in digitizing anything pastoral. The second you put a text box in front of someone and ask them to submit a request, you've introduced a small bit of distance — it's not a hand on someone's shoulder after service, it's a UI element. I don't think that's a reason to avoid doing it. I think it's a reason to be careful about how you do it.
What I'd Actually Recommend
A few things I've seen work, both from building this and from watching how churches actually use it.
Keep the form short. If someone's in a hard moment, a request form with eight required fields is a wall, not a help. Name, request, and how public they want it to be — that's close to the ceiling of what should be required.
Let people choose visibility. Some requests are meant for the whole congregation. Some are meant for the pastor and nobody else. A prayer list that treats every request the same way will eventually make someone regret submitting one, and they'll stop.
Moderate it, but don't bottleneck it. Someone should be reading submissions before they go live — not to police them, just to catch the occasional spam or the request that's clearly meant to be private and got the wrong box checked. That person shouldn't be a bottleneck that holds a request for three days, though. Real needs don't wait well.
The Point Isn't the List
The prayer list itself is not the ministry. It's a way of making sure a need doesn't get lost between the person who mentioned it in the hallway and the people who'd actually want to know. Printed bulletins and forwarded email chains do this too, just slower and with more chances for something to fall through. If a digital version of this ever starts feeling more efficient than caring, that's worth noticing and fixing — but efficient and caring aren't opposites. Most of the time, efficient is what makes caring possible at the scale a real congregation needs.