Signing up
An account is free and takes a minute. You give a name, an email address and a phone number, and you are asked to confirm the email before some things — messaging other members, posting — become available. That wait is not bureaucracy: it is most of what keeps the platform free of the advertising accounts that fill every other church noticeboard online.
You do not have to be Anglican. You are asked once which tradition you come from, and the answer changes nothing about what you may do — it only stops the platform speaking to a visitor as though they were a member of a church they have never belonged to.
Your home church
The single most useful thing you can do after signing up. Naming your home church is what turns a general-purpose site into your parish's.
You can name three kinds of connection: the church you actually belong to, a church you are resident near but not a member of — useful for students and anyone working away — and churches you simply want to follow. What arrives in your feed, which prayer wall you see, and whose bulletin reaches you all follow from this.
If you joined through a link your parish shared, it is already your home church and there is nothing to do. A diocese's link asks you to choose your parish as you join.
Your profile
Your profile can be public or private, and it starts private. A public one can be found by other members, shows the church hierarchy you belong to, and is what allows somebody to send you a direct message. A private one cannot be messaged at all.
Adding your birthday is worth doing. Your parish keeps a quiet list of them and greets you — with a prayer rather than a graphic — which for a lot of people is the first moment the platform stops feeling like software.
What reaches your phone
There are more than fifty things the platform can tell you about, and you should not be told about most of them. Notification preferences in your account settings lets you decide per subject and per channel — in the app, by email, or as a push notification on your phone.
Push notifications are off until you say otherwise, and the platform asks once, with a reason. If you decline, that decision follows you across every device you sign in on and you will not be asked again.
If you would rather have one thing a week than several a day, the weekly digest is the setting to look for: one email on a Saturday, instead of a notification each time something happens. It carries your parish's week, and beneath it whatever your archdeaconry and diocese have published, each labelled so you can tell which is which.
The feed
Your feed carries what your churches publish, what the people you follow write, and prayer requests from your parish. It reorders itself each time you open it and keeps track of what you have already seen, so it does not simply show you the same four things for a week.
If something is not for you, you can dismiss it or snooze the person or subject behind it. That is a better answer than muting the whole feed, and the platform pays attention to it.
Praying with other people
Your parish's prayer wall takes requests from members. Nothing appears on it until somebody on the parish team has approved it, which is deliberate — a prayer wall is the easiest surface on any church site to abuse.
Anyone can mark that they have prayed for a request. The person who asked sees the count, and for a great many of them that is the point of asking: not the answer, but knowing they were not asking alone.
You may also ask for a pastoral visit through a request, which reaches your parish's own private log rather than the wall.
Reading offline
Data is expensive and signal is not everywhere. Scripture, the hymnal and the daily offices can all be downloaded to your phone and read with no connection at all — on a bus, in a village, in a service.
Look for keep offline on any of those. What you have downloaded stays until you remove it.
Installing it like an app
AnglicanNG can be added to your home screen and used like any other app, without going anywhere near an app store. On Android, your browser will offer to install it; on an iPhone, use Share and then Add to Home Screen.
It is worth doing. It is faster, it works offline, and it is the only way push notifications will reach you on an iPhone.
Keeping your account safe
Nobody from AnglicanNG will ever ask you for your password, and no genuine message from the platform will ask you to send money to an individual.
Direct messages only work between members with public profiles, and you can report any member or anything posted. Reports go to a moderation queue that a person reads.
If something has gone wrong — an account you cannot get into, a message you should not have received, a church listed that should not be — open a support ticket from your account. It reaches the platform's own administrators, and your reply comes back in the same place.