PRAYERMATE
Developed by Andy Geers
Free app for iOS and Android (sponsored by
London City Mission)
Download from App Store, Google play and
Amazon appstore
I don’t think I’m alone in struggling to pray. Consistency and perseverance have always been a struggle for me.
I tend to pray for my immediate family and immediate concerns, rather than praying for both now and the future, for the local and for the global. Recent sermons at church have greatly challenged me to be more structured in prayer, to pray bigger prayers, to persevere in prayer. Prayermate was recommended as a tool that might help. I also don't think I’m alone in wasting far too much time on my iPhone and iPad (Angry Birds Star Wars any-one?!). I use my Apple products constantly, to do my grocery shopping, manage my diary, FaceTime with family – why not to order my prayer life?
Technology for prayer
Prayermate is an app for smartphones and notebooks that acts as a technology-enabled prayer diary. Sponsored by London City Mission and developed by Andy Geers, it allows you to enter the things you want to pray for and how often you want to pray for them. You enter categories (church, mission, family, friends, for example) and subjects within the category, each of which appears as a kind of index card. Then each time you open the app, it presents you with a new list of prayer points that you swipe through. So, you can set things you want to pray for every day: my immediate family, my church elders, prayers of repentance, for example. All of these have their own card that you can add photos to (it feels a bit strange downloading a photo of your pastor to add to an app but it really encourages you to pray with a smiling face in front of you). You can add subjects that you set to pray for weekly: a different godchild, missionary or church activity each day, for example, or even things that you would like to pray for on certain days of the month or less frequently. You can also limit the number of things to pray for to whatever amount you feel is do-able. The app also allows you to sign up for prayer feeds from various missionary societies, churches or Bible colleges, so I get a daily prayer point from the Barnabas Fund.
Set-up time
Yes, the set-up takes a little while, especially if you add photos to each of your cards (but this is quite fun and I find really spurs me on in prayer). The setting-up process also really helped me to make conscious choices about how I structure my prayers: having categories for mission, non-Christian friends and personal godliness has helped me to prioritise these areas and ensures they get prayed for. It is generally very intuitive and easy to use.
Features
Some of the other functionality includes:
• the ability to e-mail sections from Prayermate to others, so you could use your smartphone to take notes at home group and then immediately send the prayer points to everybody
• attaching web links or PDFs to your subjects so you can link to missionary prayer letters you get sent
• copying and pasting text from emails or websites
• help and support is available by sending an email from the app, and my experience is that this support is very responsive
New-fangled whizziness
Obviously, this isn’t for everyone. Technophobes need not concern themselves with this new-fangled whizziness. But, if you are a smartphone or notebook user, I can think of no better use for this technology. I have been using Prayermate for three months now and it is no exaggeration to say that it has transformed my intercessory prayer. It is helping me to pray bigger, wider prayers and to pray about more people and things more often. Because I can cut and paste verses from my Bible app, it helps my prayers to become more biblical as I see a friend’s face and a verse from one of Paul’s epistles that encourages me to pray that ‘the eyes of her heart may be enlightened in order that she may know the hope to which he has called her’ instead of mundane, earthly things.
I’ve added a Prayers Answered section and it is so encouraging to see this list get longer and longer as God answers. The photos and the swiping through also make it appealing to my little ones on the odd occasion that they have pattered in to my quiet time. They particularly like seeing their own faces included!
Hesitations
If I have a hesitation, it is that, wonderful as the app for prayer for people and things is, I wonder if it is the right tool for prayers of worship, of praise and of repentance. I’m not sure that it is the right tool for these kinds of prayer, and I need to fight my horrible predilection for thinking that if I have prayed through a list I have ‘done’ prayer. Because of this, I find that having a period of prayer in response to whatever I have been reading in Scripture first, before getting the app out, works better for me. It may also be useful to have days or periods without using the app. I’ve also made sure that the first cards I see each time are verses that describe the glory and holiness of God as I know I am guilty of marching up to the throne with my own agenda, and the app is essentially a list of my agenda.
But these are small things and remedied by seeing this not as the total solution to prayer, but a helpful tool for much of it. It would be great to see more churches and missionary societies using the app to share prayer points and it would be interesting to hear how churches are using it with their members to share prayer points.
Thank you to Andy Geers for helping me to pray more, and about more. I encourage you to give it a try.
