Those shiny screens college students (and really, all of us) wield 24/7 aren’t just useful for our social lives—they can be advantageous discipleship tools as well. As much as some of us might long to return to a simpler, unplugged time, changing the tide on smartphone usage isn’t going to happen anytime soon (if ever). Rather than bemoaning that fact, we can leverage the handy devices to aid in the spiritual growth of our students. Here are three apps you and your students would benefit from using individually and as a group.
“Those shiny screens college students (and really all of us) wield 24/7 aren’t just useful for our social lives – they can be advantageous discipleship tools as well.”
Britney Lyn Hamm
PrayerMate
If you asked your students, “What stops you from praying more?” you’d probably get a lot of these answers:
- I get distracted
- It’s boring
- I don’t know how or what to pray
- I don’t have time
- I forget
- I feel like I just say the same things over and over
Enter PrayerMate. This prayer app lives up to its name, functioning as your prayer companion. It comes alongside your prayer life to offer a way to organize your prayer life, remind you to pray, and help you know what and how to pray. You can create lists (e.g. “Friends”) with subjects (e.g. “Bethany”) containing prayer cards (e.g. specific requests or prayers). When adding items to pray for each subject, you can add blank cards and fill in your own requests/prayers, add an event to pray for, download a prayer pack on a certain theme, upload a PDF attachment, or add Scripture prayers and promises from Tim Keller’s Take Words With You (these pull in Scripture passages, either promises or biblical prayers, on a variety of themes such as protection, comfort, God’s love, etc.). You can also search for organizations to pray for and access their prayer feed.
Once you have your lists set up and stocked with cards, you decide how many things you want to pray in each prayer session. You can set the app to remind you to pray at a certain time of day. When you open the app and swipe left to pray, it automatically pulls up the number of things you’ve set to pray for and the next topic on each list. This gives you clarity on who and what to pray for and a clear end point for your prayer session. Want to pray another time that day? You can repeat the list of topics you prayed for earlier or have the app go on to the next in line.
Favorite Feature: I love the downloadable prayer packs containing pre written prayers and prompts on a variety of topics. Want to pray for your lost friends? Download 11 things to pray for nonbelievers. Want to pray for your own spiritual growth? Download 7 prayers for generosity. Want to pray for world missions? Download a missionary prayer guide. These catalyze your prayer life, taking the “what should I pray?” factor out and centering your prayers around Scripture, as most prayer packs involve either praying through the words Scripture or provide Scripture references. Note that some prayer packs are paid, but there are plenty of free options.
Downside: The app doesn’t have the most intuitive interface. Maximizing its potential takes some experimentation. You can fix that by spending one of your large group gatherings downloading the app and walking through the setup together. Spend twenty minutes doing a tech tutorial to get students praying more? Yes, please.
College Ministry Usage Tip: Users can create code-protected prayer groups where you can share, keep track of, and pray for requests (note that you must become a Patron to create a group. Patronage is $0.99/month). Starting a prayer group for your college ministry would be a fantastic way to foster a culture of prayerfulness.
Beyond that, PrayerMate has a whole other level of functionality for churches and organizations. With a free plan of up to 25 subscribers and 1 feed or paid plans starting at $15 for more, organizations can create feeds to publish their prayer points. These feeds can be publicly accessible or restricted to a select group of prayer partners, and sensitive requests can even be encrypted. Integrations for seamlessly publishing prayer points to social media are available as well.
Read Scripture
The ReadScripture app is a year-long Bible reading plan in app form with a simple, clean interface. Taking you from the beginning of Scripture to the end, it breaks the overarching story of the Bible into sixteen chronological sections. Each day you’ll read a few chapters plus a Psalm. By the end of the year, you’ll have read through the entire Bible once, plus each of the Psalms at least twice. The Psalms are meant to be read as the prayers that they are, so the app gets you reading and praying in the same sessions.
This app’s big appeal is its ease-of-us and the integration of Bible Project videos. The text of Scripture is right there on the screen (in ESV) in an easy-to-read format. No guesswork, no flipping pages, no searching for a reference. You can read anytime, anywhere. The app supplements the readings with correlating videos from the Bible Project. Some videos provide overviews of each book of the Bible and its contextual basis. Others trace themes throughout Scripture to help you better understand what you’re reading in the broader backdrop of the biblical narrative. The videos are also embedded in the app, so there’s no searching, links, or opening another app to watch them.
Favorite Feature: Aside from tying in the Bible Project videos, I appreciate the app’s flexibility. The settings allow you to choose if you want to read at your own pace or read every day. So, if reading the Bible in a year is too daunting for you, you can take it at a more digestible speed. You can also set the start date, so whether you want to begin reading through the Bible in January or June, the app will flex with your timing. No matter what you choose, it tracks your progress and shows you exactly where to pick up reading the next day.
College Ministry Usage Tip: Since you can choose your own start date, you can easily have your college ministry group start the reading plan on the same day.
Downside: If you’re looking for any additional study tools, you won’t find them on this app (keep reading for that). It’s very simple—just the text and the videos, no bells and whistles. But as long as you understand what its purpose is, this isn’t really a downside, especially considering it’s 100% free.
Blue Letter Bible
Anyone can be a Bible scholar with the Blue Letter Bible app. Okay, maybe not, but close. This app puts a host of Bible study tools at your fingertips. Want to find out the Greek or Hebrew word in a text? Compare a verse in different translations side by side? Take notes and read commentaries? This app can do it all, and in a highly customizable way. Here’s a brief, but not exhaustive, list of features:
- Bookmarks and notetaking: The app comes equipped with a bookmarking system with folder hierarchy and a notetaking system with ability to create multiple “notebooks”, each containing individual pages of notes. You can also add notes to a specific verse.
- Reading history: The app tracks your history so that it’s easy to find again any passage or resource you recently referenced while using the app
- Search the Bible: Ever wished you could Ctrl+F the pages of your Bible? This is basically that, with a search engine that allows you to search for a verse, word, or phrase throughout the entire Bible or whatever range you set.
- Verse study tools: When you look at a passage, click a verse and a plethora of verse study tools will appear, including:
- Interlinear/concordance showing Hebrew and Greek words. Click on an individual Greek or Hebrew word and the app will show the pronunciation, part of speech, outline of biblical usage, Strong’s definition, lexicon, and list of every passage containing that word.
- Commentaries: the app has a number of commentaries in text, audio, and video form.
- Cross references: with one click you can see a list of cross references for every word in the verse.
- Side by side comparison: click this tab and you’ll see the verse in over two dozen different translations.
- Extensive customization settings: You can customize just about anything (except the words of Scripture) ranging from the font features to the colors to whether the words of Christ appear in red to what finger taps and swipes do.
- Daily reading plans: The app includes multiple reading plans to choose from and a handy checklist to mark progress.
- Translations: You can download virtually any version of the Bible, including those in many other languages.
Favorite Feature: I’m a nerd, so I love the ability to do in-depth word study. Seeing what a certain word means in Greek or Hebrew and how it is used throughout the rest of Scripture deeply enhances the understanding of a given verse.
"Seeing what a certain word means in Greek or Hebrew and how it is used throughout the rest of Scripture deeply enhances the understanding of a given verse." @BritneyLynHamm #collegiatedisciplemaker 3 Free Apps Your College Ministry… Click To TweetCollege Ministry Usage Tip: This app leaves your students no excuse to not sharpen their Bible study skills. Encourage everyone to download it, then put it to use during Bible studies. When people ask questions, instead of giving them the answer, you can guide them to it by using the tools on this app. This will help them be equipped to let the Word of Christ dwell in them richly on their own.
Downside: This app has a lot of functionality, but with that comes the learning curve to figure how to maximally utilize each feature. The army of helpful info buttons throughout the app make up for this downside by explaining what each feature is and how to use it.
These three apps can boost your students’ prayer lives and enhance their grasp of God’s Word while helping your ministry build deeper community. Like any apps, they are only useful when we use them, so if you decide to implement one (or more) in your ministry, set the example by sticking to it and putting it to good use. College kids get a bad rap for being on their phones all the time; why not give them a better reason to be on them?
