This Prayer App Changes Lives — 600 Million Prayers and Counting
Movieguide® Contributor
Alex Jones was working at a great job and everything was good — externally. On the inside, though, he felt empty and anxious. That’s when he discovered peace through prayer and created the world’s most successful religious app — Hallow.
“I started learning about this whole beautiful rich tradition of contemplative and meditative prayer within the church, things like lectio divina or imaginative prayer within this rich tradition of Christianity that I’d honestly never heard of before, and lectio divina is a way of meditating with scripture. You pick a word that sticks out to you from scripture, and you meditate on it, and I randomly opened up the Bible to Luke 11 where the disciples ask Jesus to teach them how to pray, and he gives them the ‘Our Father [prayer],’ and hallow is the word that that stuck out to me that I meditated on,” the founder shared about the app’s beginnings.
“It was just 10 minutes in the comfort of my little studio apartment with my wife but…it just changed my life,” the Stanford graduate explained. “…It was the deepest peace I’d ever experienced in my life.”
Hallow means to make holy. Through his meditation, he found that God was trying to make him holy.
“Was I supposed to be growing in holiness? Was I supposed to be helping other people grow in holiness? And the answer was no. I was just doing my own career for my own career’s sake. Just doing what I thought I was supposed to be doing and trying to get ahead, and so it led me to do this crazy thing where I quit my job, which, you know, is a job that I loved, and drain my 401k and max out my credit cards and do all this crazy stuff to do this startup.”
Most of Jones’ family and friends thought his app was a dumb idea. But still, he persisted because he knew it was what he was supposed to do.
“So, it was really stressful. Big stressful questions. But [I was] wrestling with them in this place of deep peace, and you know, I knew from that moment it was a real interaction with God, which is impossible to put into words, but I knew I had had to do that for the rest of my life, and so we built the app, really just for me at the beginning, but man, that was five, six years ago, and we’ve just been blown away.”
Because of Jones’ faithfulness, the app has been extremely successful. Over 22 million people have downloaded it.
Prayer app Hallow has just topped Apple’s app chart…
READ MORE: HALLOW IS FIRST RELIGIOUS APP TO HIT #1 ON APPLE’S APP STORE
“I think 600 million prayers have been prayed through it, so closing in on a billion,” Jones said. “But we’ve got a little bit to go. Although the next few months are going to be pretty massive, we’ve got a good chunk of really exciting content coming out across 150 different countries. I think it’s maybe 149.”
“It’s been it’s been mind-blowing…No religious app of any sort, Christian or any other sort of religion, no Bible app, no wellness app, no meditation app had ever cracked the top 10 in the App Store rankings, and this last Ash Wednesday we were number one, which glory to God,” Jones said.
Recently, China blocked Hallow from its app store for “illegal content.”
Jones was disappointed by China’s actions. He noted that he’s praying for the Christians in China.
“We will continue to try and serve our brothers and sisters in Christ in China as best we can through our website, web application, social media content, but mostly with our prayers,” Jones said.