There are 2.4 billion Christians in the world today, according to most estimates.

Then again, nearly 3 billion people have Facebook accounts. Nearly 70% of U.S. adults use this social-media platform, which recently passed $1 trillion in market capitalization.

"I will use Facebook to reach people, because you almost have to do that," Father Andrew Stephen Damick, chief content officer for Ancient Faith Ministries, a 24-hour source for online radio channels, podcasts, weblogs, forums and more. The ministry was born in 2004 and is now part of the North American archdiocese of the ancient Orthodox Patriarchate of Antioch.

Facebook remains, he noted, "the No. 1 social-media platform in the world -- by a lot. You can't ignore all those people. … We knew this before COVID, but the pandemic made it impossible to deny the obvious. Everyone had to go online, one way or another."

Facebook Live became a way to stream worship services online, even if all a pastor could do was mount a smartphone on a stand. Even small congregations began holding online religious-education classes, support groups and leadership meetings.

As for worship, it was one thing for Protestant megachurches to stream TV-friendly services built on pop-rock Christian music and charismatic preaching. The online options were more problematic for faiths in which worship centered on the smells, bells, images and tastes of ancient liturgies.

Then, in early June, images began circulating of a Twitter message introducing "Prayer Posts" allowing Facebook users to "enable group members to ask for and respond to prayers" with a few clicks in a page's control settings. Participation could be as simple as a user clicking an "I prayed" button linked to a prayer.

This isn't a totally new idea. The Facebook "Prayer Warriors" group already has 865,700 active members, a flock larger than the average of 518,000 Episcopalians that attended services on an average Sunday in 2019, according to the denomination's statistics.