Welcome into the pursuit of manliness podcast where we are vigorously equipping men to pursue biblical manliness. My name is Jared Samuels. I'm the host of the podcast. Men, as always, I like to begin by thanking you for checking out today's show. Now whether you're watching this on YouTube, listening on iTunes, Spotify, wherever you grab your podcast content, I wanna ask you, make sure you click subscribe. That way you never miss any of these podcast episodes. I know there's been a bit of a gap from the last 1 to this 1. Every fifth week of of the month, which happens 4 times a year, I typically pull back on the content that's posted. Just a little bit of a reprieve during that time. But also I've been kind of sifting through what is the best approach to this podcast to make sure the right episodes are getting out, looking at the feedback that I received from these episodes. And so for right now, we're going Wednesday, Friday just to kinda see how that plays out. So on Wednesdays, you'll you'll hear some interviews like you're gonna hear today. You're gonna hear Quiet Life. It's still about the Quiet Life. And on Fridays, we're still about out in the garage. Really nothing's changed. We're just inviting some of these guests into the Quiet Life conversation with us.
Speaking of our guest today, it's Ryan Beck of Pray dot com. It's the number 1 prayer app with 14000000 subscribers. Ryan talks about how this online space, this app, how it is giving or helping people have a stronger prayer life. There's community aspects. There's a lot of different moving pieces to this app that I had no idea about. And I was really encouraged by the conversation with Ryan. But I also wanna add that as good as technology is, and that's what I try to use with the pursuit of manliness, podcast, YouTube, Facebook, Tribe, The Herd, all this stuff built online and kind of in this online space, we still need face to face. We still need the local church. We still need discipleship. We still need to practice evangelism and coming alongside people. And iron sharpens iron. All the things the Bible teaches us. While I believe technology can give us a great supplement to what we feel like we are lacking, we need to make sure that we don't remain solely in that space.
Men, it's time for today's conversation. Let's pray. God, I thank you for today. Thank you for, waking us up. I thank you for allowing us to connect in this fashion. And, god, I pray for Ryan. Thank you for the ministry he's doing. I thank you for, the things we're gonna learn in this conversation. There's a lot of people going to, become more aware of what they do at pray dot com and what this looks like and how it's kinda realized within the local church, within the body of believers. And we got guys doing ministry in all different forms and fashions, and, God, this could be an excellent resource for them. I pray for the men that are listening. Guys in their trucks, the guys maybe they're working out, going for a walk, wherever they're at, that this wouldn't reach them right where they're at. It'd be in a timely manner, and at the end of it all, you get the glory. It is in Jesus' name we pray. Amen. Amen.
Well, man, at this time, I wanna introduce mister Ryan Beck to the podcast. Ryan, thanks for making time being on the show today. Well, thank you, Jared. I appreciate you having me, and I'm looking forward to this conversation. Ryan, before we get into what what this is, what what we do, you guys can see in the title. You figured it out. Once you introduce yourself, who you are, what you do, and we'll just dive right into it. So I am Ryan Beck. I am the CTO and 1 of the cofounders of pray dot com. It's a start up, technology media faith app, that we started in 20 17. And so I've been fortunate enough to be able to build it with, 3 other great cofounders, Steve, Mike, and Matt. And so we've been on this journey for just about 6 years, and it's been very exciting. We've been able to serve the church through technology and media in a new format that, generally, we we haven't seen in in the church space.
So I I I gotta be honest. You got 1 of the best domain names ever. I don't know how you secured that. I don't know if there was a buyout or what, but well done, Ryan. Yeah. Yeah. And that was, it was a it was expensive but fair. I understand. So you talk about serving the churches. I think some churches do technology well. Some churches would like to do it better, but they don't have the resources. Some guys are like, what is technology? So why don't you why don't you lay the groundwork? What do you guys do? What what are you about? How do you help the church?
So we provide an online place, a digital destination for people to practice their faith and their relationship with Jesus. So what that means is a lot of times, we become like a front door for the churches of the world. It's much easier now to engage with faith. And what I mean by that is there's more opportunity and more access to faith. However, churches generally haven't been the haven't been at the forefront of technology. And so they still sit in this brick and mortar, space where that access is a little more difficult for most people growing up today. Because most people, when they wanna interact with communities, a lot of them choose digital spaces first, and then they'll build into these in person, communities. And so we see ourselves as as a way to provide us, the front door for the church so people can, who are maybe Christian curious and wanna know more about Christian but don't wanna visit a church. So we give them an easy app to download, and they can start engaging with Christian content from faith leaders all around, the United States and world, such as Jack Graham, Tony Evans, Beth Jones.
And so we've been fortunate to work with these amazing pastors to provide amazing content for people who are seeking to engage with Christianity either for the first time or, to reestablish that faith. And then we follow that up with more engaging content because we know that, our faith doesn't end there at evangelism and at the gospel, but we wanna grow in our faith. We wanna be able to, be discipled in our faith. And so we provide more in-depth content to help people explore the themes of the Bible. So we work with pastors around the world. They may not actually upload content, but they help us write. So we work with theologians and pastors to to provide in-depth faith content around certain themes or characters. So David. So we're we just released something called heroes in the Bible, David with pastor Tony Evans. And he'll give you think of it like your Charles per Charles Spurgeon morning and evening devotional. You get a little bit of a a devotional of what this part of the story of David is about from doctor Tony Evans, and then we go into the reading.
We're very, very, very much built on the foundation of scripture and scripture guiding the stories that we tell. And so we try to deliver them in a more, more engaging format than maybe you're used to in an audio form. So a lot of our content is audio. Some of it's video. So you may have been familiar with my first audio bible was James Earl Jones Reads the Bible. And we actually have James Earl Jones Reading the Bible on our app, but it was done quite a while ago Quite a while ago. And so what we do is we take stuff like that where we work with great partners and we've done things with, like, Drew Breeze and the Cray and, even doctor Phil, who a lot of people don't realize is a Christian and, he wanted to do he was very enthusiastic about doing some Christian content. So we work with these amazing partners, and they don't just read stories. We add. We get, you know, 60 piece orchestras, and we do the whole 9 yards when it comes to Hollywood production. That's part of our background. Our background is faith, tech, and media. And so we live and breathe with you know, a lot of us are from California, so we live and breathe cutting edge tech, Hollywood production style, media development, and that's what we seek to bring to the church and to people of faith to help them grow in the faith and cold faith community.
As you're saying that, I I I think of a story I've heard a few, but 1 in particular that an individual heard me on a podcast, not a Christian podcast, but heard me talk about faith. This person started to pursue their own faith. We use Tribe. It's a digital space, digital community, whatever. It always moves into real life, and that's the ultimate goal. Let's get faith face to face. And now this person's finding a church and getting to share their faith with their family, etcetera. Do you guys get to hear some of those stories? Do you get to hear people like, hey. I started here. I listened to James Earl Jones read the bible or whatever. And and because of that, now I've, you know, God has done this, this, and this. Do you ever get to hear those stories?
Yeah. So we get tons of stories. We get stories of people who, who may be moved and don't have a home church, so they're using us to supplement it. Or we get people who, are reengaging with their faith, finding pastors on really engage buying their books, you know, from that and engaging it. And then lastly, what you said, where people go, Jeremy McGarity in San Diego. I love his content. I'm in San Diego. I'm gonna go go to, I'm gonna go to Jeremy McGarity's church. And so we get all of that and more people engaging with our content. Because what ends up happening is, and I I go back to this front door of the church because the the front door moved. It used to be physical. It used to be on your church. It used to be on your your corner of your your city, but a lot of people, they engage digitally now.
And so just like with movie theaters, movie theaters on decline, but people still are watching movies. And so you may have seen those alarming trends where a church tendencies declining year on year. But people of faith, god still exists. God's still doing his work. He's performing miracles every day, and people are still engaging with Jesus in a real and tangible way. They're just doing it more in more spaces. And 1 of those spaces is the digital space, and we see an opportunity in which we can help connect people to, the Jesus that has transformed us pre Internet and post Internet. And so we're just doing it through a digital medium, and that doesn't mean that's where they stop and that's where they live. But these oftentimes start getting connected to communities either close to them or sometimes they do you know, some people are just full digital. They're like, I'm embracing the future. I'm going full digital, and they try to form those digital teams. But still, we live in a very much a hybrid world. So people are connecting with their faith digitally, and they're connecting with their faith, in person at these local churches as well.
And we seem to be kind of this, you know, we have this picture in scripture where the holy spirit comes alongside of us. Right? And he helps us in our faith. And so very much, we we take that as a, as an image of how we can operate alongside the church. We can come alongside the physical church, and we can help supplement them in their digital activities to help them leapfrog into the current technological age that we're in even if they were a little bit of laggards. And so that's that's where we see. We like to come alongside the church. We like to see we see the world as a hybrid. People are engaging with their faith digitally and physically, and we wanna help bridge that gap.
I think 2020 helped build build the bridge faster. Because in 2020, obviously, for a a portion of our time, depending on where you live in the world, meeting face to face was not much of a viable option, especially for churches. Some churches were behind the ball when it came to livestream if they had any stream at all. Some guys were preaching in their, recliners with a cell phone in their hands. Some guys had the full blown, you know, tech team that was producing, you know, incredible weekend services with nobody in the room. And so everyone had to kinda have that conversation of how do we reach our people when they physically are not going to be here. Some people did not come back. Some people are coming back, and some were already there. Have you seen that change in the way the churches themselves interact with you guys as far as seeing you now as a resource for them as opposed to maybe someone who they could have seen you previously as someone who was maybe competing for the same audience?
So I wouldn't see, I don't think people saw us as competing for the same audience, pre COVID or post COVID. I do think the COVID story, though, is completely correct. It fast forwarded us. Right? It was the it was the millennials and younger that were going digital community. COVID forced everyone to figure that out. And now everyone has that in their their toolset. And, you know, some people are saying, hey. You know what? I got I got a family of 3 kids and my, you know, and my husband would get up. It's not the easiest thing to get the church, the kids to the church every Sunday. So maybe, you know, 2 2 Sundays, we go to church and 2, we live stream and we stay home and we do family. And so you're seeing that movement. You're seeing people move into where, unfortunately, a lot of the smaller churches weren't able to survive the pandemic. And so you're seeing, some consolidation happening to these bigger churches.
And so, what you're finding is, yes, people are moving back on, back to physical church because we desire that physical community. You know? Even if we have this visual, we wanna meet the people. We wanna go do things in person. Right? There's still so much to do in person. And so that is a trend that we're seeing as people are are, you know, definitely going back to church. It's just there's been a consolidation of churches, the smaller ones closing and people moving to bigger ones. And then, yeah, you see people shifting maybe based on ideology or you're like, you know what? We actually like how they did this during the pandemic. We like how they did this, and everyone has their different flavors. And so you're seeing a lot of shifting in physical church, but 1 thing remains true. Digital church accelerated during that time, and it's not going anywhere.
And now what you what you what we've seen is pre COVID, there was this let's this kind of more traditional way of doing church. Right? Hey. Real church is done in person. Real church is done in person. And now with COVID, you realize, okay. Well, actually, this digital church, maybe that is a real way to do church. You know? Where 2 or more gathered, that you know, you hear that saying, but 2 or more gathered, that's church. And so what you're seeing is more of an embrace of digital church is acceptable insofar as it's it sits on the umbrella of a hybrid, faith experience, digital plus physical.
I think the obstacle I have is, you know, there's certain things that happen in the local church that can't happen in a digital space. You can be fed essentially from a spiritual high chair in a digital space. You get to consume, but you don't have to give back. You know, I don't have to hold a baby in the nursery. I don't have to be a greeter. I don't have to pick up communion cups or anything like that because I'm in my pajamas, or I'm driving down the road listening to a sermon or whatever. The other thing is too it's hard to love on people from a distance. And so we got we need to find a way to get that face to face local church, bride of Christ type relationships. But I I'm a big proponent that I think as you talk about the front door moved, I agree. We think that as our church as well, the people we're live streaming for really isn't for our people. It's for the people down the road that will eventually log on and go, okay. What what is this church about? What's the pastor look like? What is the worship like? Whatever. It kinda gives them that that open door. And I think you guys are doing that as well. For some people, it might be their first interaction with faith in general, you know, or it might be the guy at the gym was talking about faith. Guess what? How Facebook works. Faith pray dot com is the ad that pops up in front of my face, you know, so I click on it. Yeah. Whatever. And so it it kinda gets them 1 of the things you talked about was discipleship. Where does discipleship come in with what you guys do? Like, where's the equipping? What pieces do you have to help equip somebody to say, okay. This is the front door. Now let's get you in to sit on the couch and start to have some real conversation.
Yeah. So we we what we do is when we look at the product that we have built, the app and the website, we say, what are people doing in their analog faith experience? And how do you how do you bring that to life in the digital experience? Like you said, not everything can be reproduced digitally. And so with those things that can be, how can we do how can we use our skills? How can we be excellent in our execution of delivering the best faith experience we can digitally. And so we look at some of those analog things. So whether it's small groups or in 1 thing that we get that you don't hit a physical church, there's no need, people are actually going there, is we can actually we have an audience that uses our app, and we can actually promote certain ministries that may be closer to them so we can match them with ministries. So that's 1 benefit that we can do. We can we can recommend leaders or sermons based on topics, and sometimes those aren't, you know, necessarily close to them. But what that allows them to do is start forming relationships with these, ministries, who may they may gravitate towards because maybe this pastor does marriage really well. That's their that's their jam. They do marriage, and that's the struggle or that's what they need at that time. Or, hey. This person really helps you be a good steward of your finances, and that's the struggle you have. And you wanna figure out how do I be a good steward of my finances. Well, Dave Ramsey's, you know, he's the guy. It'll help you be a good steward. Right?
And so you could connect with people on and that's 1 of the things that I think the digital space allows for a little bit more freedom, where you can actually start getting people connected by the topics and things that concern them. Because your your local church, they may do a small group on finances, but it's once a year or once every 3 years, and you're like, hey. I kinda you know, that's something that I, you know, I need to go through or, relationships or whatever. It allows you to connect with it it allows us to have more variability in the small group or the in-depth offering that we can provide to help people go further.
And, you know, 1 of the things that, this last part, a lot of churches, they spend a lot of resources counseling people. They're counseling people on, yeah, do you have relationships, marriage, but sometimes on mental health concerns. And so this is something that, the church, they they have every pastor's basically a counselor whether they're trained or not. That's just what it is. Right? And so what we have the opportunity to do, knowing that, you know, the pandemic, it it accelerated a lot of things, some for good and some for bad. 1 of those things that's for bad is a mental health pandemic that's now occurring where people are experiencing anxiety and depression and some of these, mental health struggles that we're hearing a lot of in the news. You've even heard, you know, the governor of Texas talk about how we need to we need to provide more mental health resources for people to get, to them, before tragedies happen. And so these things are occurring. These mental health issues are occurring inside the church, and that's 1 of the unique things that we have an opportunity to do. We can have more in-depth offerings for that and allow people across the globe and across the nation to connect on these these offerings that are more tailored and specific and recommended for them to help them go deeper in their faith.
Because a lot of that maturing of discipleship is it it's not just this. It's not just engaging deeper in your faith and that relationship with Jesus on specific topics. You know, we all go through that when like, oh, I need to I need to control my, my anger or my tongue or whatever we that struggle is. We we often go to scripture and go in-depth in that, and then we pray and we meditate on that. And so we help people go deep on those subjects that matter to them, that help them grow in their discipleship. Now there's the the second part, which is the community part, which is essential. Right? And so that's where we try to facilitate, chat, connecting with your friends and family. So we're rolling out a a feature. We we rolled out the first iteration of it called community boards. And so a lot of times you hear leaderboards, you know, and you're really like, hey. You know, who's at the top? Well, we wanted to take a different spin on that. We wanted to give people something that's more communal in nature, but allows them to encourage each other in their faith where you can actually, go and you can keep, accountable with your friends and family. So, hey, you wanna pray every day? Well, we'll give you a fun way to engage with it. You go in and you do your morning prayer and you make sure you remind your, you know, your grandma. You know? Usually, grandma's the 1 reminding us, but, you know, maybe the maybe the the the tables have turned in your household.
And so, you can remind your friends and family, and we allow people to engage with their their community in these light touch ways. But, also, you can use our chat features to go in-depth and form small groups as well. And so we like to combine that personal aspect of your faith and help you go deep on topics such as mental health. And then we also try to combine those community aspects so you can go deep in that digital, that digital community that you're forming this with.
That's the double edged sword of online world. The the the mental health issue is it can make it worse or it can make it way better. If you use it for good, it can really help you. You're up at 2 in the morning and you can't sleep, and when get on your prey dot com. And and, you know, we do this with Tribe. We we have guys all around the world. There's always somebody up, something happening. So you can do that, or if you choose to dwell in darkness, it makes it worse. But this is an excellent resource that they can always have available if you have accountability or if you start to build community or conversation, you're never alone. No. No. No matter what's going on, you might be physically alone in the moment. But we know when we walk with the Lord, we're we're never alone. We might be physically alone, but, man, if I can reach out and, you know, or listen to this by accident at 1 in the morning, get on pray dot com and start start find some friends, man.
So if you're you're speaking to Ryan, a pastor, he he's not good at technology. He's got a small church of 25. He's not sure what to do. He can't reach everybody. He's not good at counseling. I'm terrible at counseling. Everybody I've given marital counseling to has left our church at some point, so I I probably am not the guy you wanna come to for that. What do you tell these guys, these pastors who are not sure what to do with what you guys do? How do you how do you start to close that gap?
Well, I would say you can reach out to us. You can reach out to ryan at pray dot com, any of the founders. You can also reach out to support at pray dot com to figure out, how you can get started on pray dot com for your church. And or you can just start sending people to pray dot com and have them go through some of the resources. And what you'll find is that they'll gravitate to certain things that, you know, you didn't you didn't realize that you, that they needed. And that's the that's the beauty of what we have is we have a large variety of Christian content, that helps people in many different areas, and we have the technology and, capabilities to get them the content that they need. And so I would say just probably the easiest thing, connect with Prey, through, support at Prey dot com or just just send them the download back.
Typically, I say, hey. Where are you gonna send us? What websites? Whatever. But I'm pretty sure we're going to pray dot com because you got everything on your website. There's not you even got LinkedIn. I feel like John Fetterman when I go to LinkedIn. You have everything on that site, including your social media. So I is there anywhere else we need to go, Ryan? You can download the app. Just search pray or pray dot com, and you'll see the pray dot com app. We try to keep it simple, pray dot com. Yeah. And that's, that's how you can start engaging with the content and learning from the best pastors out there.
Let let me clarify this in case you're related to John Fetterman. You know I always wear the hooded sweatshirt and everyone else is in suits. That's how I feel when I log in to LinkedIn. Everyone's in suits and I'm over there in my hooded sweatshirt and baseball caps. So, you got the what you got the downloads on here, you got the social medias, you got everything you need to offer. So, Ryan, appreciate you doing that. Y'all have started making some some books and we wanna talk about that with the men in the herd.
Welcome into the pursuit of manliness podcast where we are vigorously equipping men to pursue biblical manliness. My name is Jared Samuels. I'm the host of the podcast. Men, as always, I like to begin by thanking you for checking out today's show. Now whether you're watching this on YouTube, listening on iTunes, Spotify, wherever you grab your podcast content, I wanna ask you, make sure you click subscribe. That way you never miss any of these podcast episodes. I know there's been a bit of a gap from the last 1 to this 1. Every fifth week of of the month, which happens 4 times a year, I typically pull back on the content that's posted. Just a little bit of a reprieve during that time. But also I've been kind of sifting through what is the best approach to this podcast to make sure the right episodes are getting out, looking at the feedback that I received from these episodes. And so for right now, we're going Wednesday, Friday just to kinda see how that plays out. So on Wednesdays, you'll you'll hear some interviews like you're gonna hear today. You're gonna hear Quiet Life. It's still about the Quiet Life. And on Fridays, we're still about out in the garage. Really nothing's changed. We're just inviting some of these guests into the Quiet Life conversation with us.
Speaking of our guest today, it's Ryan Beck of Pray dot com. It's the number 1 prayer app with 14000000 subscribers. Ryan talks about how this online space, this app, how it is giving or helping people have a stronger prayer life. There's community aspects. There's a lot of different moving pieces to this app that I had no idea about. And I was really encouraged by the conversation with Ryan. But I also wanna add that as good as technology is, and that's what I try to use with the pursuit of manliness, podcast, YouTube, Facebook, Tribe, The Herd, all this stuff built online and kind of in this online space, we still need face to face. We still need the local church. We still need discipleship. We still need to practice evangelism and coming alongside people. And iron sharpens iron. All the things the Bible teaches us. While I believe technology can give us a great supplement to what we feel like we are lacking, we need to make sure that we don't remain solely in that space.
Men, it's time for today's conversation. Let's pray. God, I thank you for today. Thank you for, waking us up. I thank you for allowing us to connect in this fashion. And, god, I pray for Ryan. Thank you for the ministry he's doing. I thank you for, the things we're gonna learn in this conversation. There's a lot of people going to, become more aware of what they do at pray dot com and what this looks like and how it's kinda realized within the local church, within the body of believers. And we got guys doing ministry in all different forms and fashions, and, God, this could be an excellent resource for them. I pray for the men that are listening. Guys in their trucks, the guys maybe they're working out, going for a walk, wherever they're at, that this wouldn't reach them right where they're at. It'd be in a timely manner, and at the end of it all, you get the glory. It is in Jesus' name we pray. Amen. Amen.
Well, man, at this time, I wanna introduce mister Ryan Beck to the podcast. Ryan, thanks for making time being on the show today. Well, thank you, Jared. I appreciate you having me, and I'm looking forward to this conversation. Ryan, before we get into what what this is, what what we do, you guys can see in the title. You figured it out. Once you introduce yourself, who you are, what you do, and we'll just dive right into it. So I am Ryan Beck. I am the CTO and 1 of the cofounders of pray dot com. It's a start up, technology media faith app, that we started in 20 17. And so I've been fortunate enough to be able to build it with, 3 other great cofounders, Steve, Mike, and Matt. And so we've been on this journey for just about 6 years, and it's been very exciting. We've been able to serve the church through technology and media in a new format that, generally, we we haven't seen in in the church space.
So I I I gotta be honest. You got 1 of the best domain names ever. I don't know how you secured that. I don't know if there was a buyout or what, but well done, Ryan. Yeah. Yeah. And that was, it was a it was expensive but fair. I understand. So you talk about serving the churches. I think some churches do technology well. Some churches would like to do it better, but they don't have the resources. Some guys are like, what is technology? So why don't you why don't you lay the groundwork? What do you guys do? What what are you about? How do you help the church?
So we provide an online place, a digital destination for people to practice their faith and their relationship with Jesus. So what that means is a lot of times, we become like a front door for the churches of the world. It's much easier now to engage with faith. And what I mean by that is there's more opportunity and more access to faith. However, churches generally haven't been the haven't been at the forefront of technology. And so they still sit in this brick and mortar, space where that access is a little more difficult for most people growing up today. Because most people, when they wanna interact with communities, a lot of them choose digital spaces first, and then they'll build into these in person, communities. And so we see ourselves as as a way to provide us, the front door for the church so people can, who are maybe Christian curious and wanna know more about Christian but don't wanna visit a church. So we give them an easy app to download, and they can start engaging with Christian content from faith leaders all around, the United States and world, such as Jack Graham, Tony Evans, Beth Jones.
And so we've been fortunate to work with these amazing pastors to provide amazing content for people who are seeking to engage with Christianity either for the first time or, to reestablish that faith. And then we follow that up with more engaging content because we know that, our faith doesn't end there at evangelism and at the gospel, but we wanna grow in our faith. We wanna be able to, be discipled in our faith. And so we provide more in-depth content to help people explore the themes of the Bible. So we work with pastors around the world. They may not actually upload content, but they help us write. So we work with theologians and pastors to to provide in-depth faith content around certain themes or characters. So David. So we're we just released something called heroes in the Bible, David with pastor Tony Evans. And he'll give you think of it like your Charles per Charles Spurgeon morning and evening devotional. You get a little bit of a a devotional of what this part of the story of David is about from doctor Tony Evans, and then we go into the reading.
We're very, very, very much built on the foundation of scripture and scripture guiding the stories that we tell. And so we try to deliver them in a more, more engaging format than maybe you're used to in an audio form. So a lot of our content is audio. Some of it's video. So you may have been familiar with my first audio bible was James Earl Jones Reads the Bible. And we actually have James Earl Jones Reading the Bible on our app, but it was done quite a while ago Quite a while ago. And so what we do is we take stuff like that where we work with great partners and we've done things with, like, Drew Breeze and the Cray and, even doctor Phil, who a lot of people don't realize is a Christian and, he wanted to do he was very enthusiastic about doing some Christian content. So we work with these amazing partners, and they don't just read stories. We add. We get, you know, 60 piece orchestras, and we do the whole 9 yards when it comes to Hollywood production. That's part of our background. Our background is faith, tech, and media. And so we live and breathe with you know, a lot of us are from California, so we live and breathe cutting edge tech, Hollywood production style, media development, and that's what we seek to bring to the church and to people of faith to help them grow in the faith and cold faith community.
As you're saying that, I I I think of a story I've heard a few, but 1 in particular that an individual heard me on a podcast, not a Christian podcast, but heard me talk about faith. This person started to pursue their own faith. We use Tribe. It's a digital space, digital community, whatever. It always moves into real life, and that's the ultimate goal. Let's get faith face to face. And now this person's finding a church and getting to share their faith with their family, etcetera. Do you guys get to hear some of those stories? Do you get to hear people like, hey. I started here. I listened to James Earl Jones read the bible or whatever. And and because of that, now I've, you know, God has done this, this, and this. Do you ever get to hear those stories?
Yeah. So we get tons of stories. We get stories of people who, who may be moved and don't have a home church, so they're using us to supplement it. Or we get people who, are reengaging with their faith, finding pastors on really engage buying their books, you know, from that and engaging it. And then lastly, what you said, where people go, Jeremy McGarity in San Diego. I love his content. I'm in San Diego. I'm gonna go go to, I'm gonna go to Jeremy McGarity's church. And so we get all of that and more people engaging with our content. Because what ends up happening is, and I I go back to this front door of the church because the the front door moved. It used to be physical. It used to be on your church. It used to be on your your corner of your your city, but a lot of people, they engage digitally now.
And so just like with movie theaters, movie theaters on decline, but people still are watching movies. And so you may have seen those alarming trends where a church tendencies declining year on year. But people of faith, god still exists. God's still doing his work. He's performing miracles every day, and people are still engaging with Jesus in a real and tangible way. They're just doing it more in more spaces. And 1 of those spaces is the digital space, and we see an opportunity in which we can help connect people to, the Jesus that has transformed us pre Internet and post Internet. And so we're just doing it through a digital medium, and that doesn't mean that's where they stop and that's where they live. But these oftentimes start getting connected to communities either close to them or sometimes they do you know, some people are just full digital. They're like, I'm embracing the future. I'm going full digital, and they try to form those digital teams. But still, we live in a very much a hybrid world. So people are connecting with their faith digitally, and they're connecting with their faith, in person at these local churches as well.
And we seem to be kind of this, you know, we have this picture in scripture where the holy spirit comes alongside of us. Right? And he helps us in our faith. And so very much, we we take that as a, as an image of how we can operate alongside the church. We can come alongside the physical church, and we can help supplement them in their digital activities to help them leapfrog into the current technological age that we're in even if they were a little bit of laggards. And so that's that's where we see. We like to come alongside the church. We like to see we see the world as a hybrid. People are engaging with their faith digitally and physically, and we wanna help bridge that gap.
I think 2020 helped build build the bridge faster. Because in 2020, obviously, for a a portion of our time, depending on where you live in the world, meeting face to face was not much of a viable option, especially for churches. Some churches were behind the ball when it came to livestream if they had any stream at all. Some guys were preaching in their, recliners with a cell phone in their hands. Some guys had the full blown, you know, tech team that was producing, you know, incredible weekend services with nobody in the room. And so everyone had to kinda have that conversation of how do we reach our people when they physically are not going to be here. Some people did not come back. Some people are coming back, and some were already there. Have you seen that change in the way the churches themselves interact with you guys as far as seeing you now as a resource for them as opposed to maybe someone who they could have seen you previously as someone who was maybe competing for the same audience?
So I wouldn't see, I don't think people saw us as competing for the same audience, pre COVID or post COVID. I do think the COVID story, though, is completely correct. It fast forwarded us. Right? It was the it was the millennials and younger that were going digital community. COVID forced everyone to figure that out. And now everyone has that in their their toolset. And, you know, some people are saying, hey. You know what? I got I got a family of 3 kids and my, you know, and my husband would get up. It's not the easiest thing to get the church, the kids to the church every Sunday. So maybe, you know, 2 2 Sundays, we go to church and 2, we live stream and we stay home and we do family. And so you're seeing that movement. You're seeing people move into where, unfortunately, a lot of the smaller churches weren't able to survive the pandemic. And so you're seeing, some consolidation happening to these bigger churches.
And so, what you're finding is, yes, people are moving back on, back to physical church because we desire that physical community. You know? Even if we have this visual, we wanna meet the people. We wanna go do things in person. Right? There's still so much to do in person. And so that is a trend that we're seeing as people are are, you know, definitely going back to church. It's just there's been a consolidation of churches, the smaller ones closing and people moving to bigger ones. And then, yeah, you see people shifting maybe based on ideology or you're like, you know what? We actually like how they did this during the pandemic. We like how they did this, and everyone has their different flavors. And so you're seeing a lot of shifting in physical church, but 1 thing remains true. Digital church accelerated during that time, and it's not going anywhere.
And now what you what you what we've seen is pre COVID, there was this let's this kind of more traditional way of doing church. Right? Hey. Real church is done in person. Real church is done in person. And now with COVID, you realize, okay. Well, actually, this digital church, maybe that is a real way to do church. You know? Where 2 or more gathered, that you know, you hear that saying, but 2 or more gathered, that's church. And so what you're seeing is more of an embrace of digital church is acceptable insofar as it's it sits on the umbrella of a hybrid, faith experience, digital plus physical.
I think the obstacle I have is, you know, there's certain things that happen in the local church that can't happen in a digital space. You can be fed essentially from a spiritual high chair in a digital space. You get to consume, but you don't have to give back. You know, I don't have to hold a baby in the nursery. I don't have to be a greeter. I don't have to pick up communion cups or anything like that because I'm in my pajamas, or I'm driving down the road listening to a sermon or whatever. The other thing is too it's hard to love on people from a distance. And so we got we need to find a way to get that face to face local church, bride of Christ type relationships. But I I'm a big proponent that I think as you talk about the front door moved, I agree. We think that as our church as well, the people we're live streaming for really isn't for our people. It's for the people down the road that will eventually log on and go, okay. What what is this church about? What's the pastor look like? What is the worship like? Whatever. It kinda gives them that that open door. And I think you guys are doing that as well. For some people, it might be their first interaction with faith in general, you know, or it might be the guy at the gym was talking about faith. Guess what? How Facebook works. Faith pray dot com is the ad that pops up in front of my face, you know, so I click on it. Yeah. Whatever. And so it it kinda gets them 1 of the things you talked about was discipleship. Where does discipleship come in with what you guys do? Like, where's the equipping? What pieces do you have to help equip somebody to say, okay. This is the front door. Now let's get you in to sit on the couch and start to have some real conversation.
Yeah. So we we what we do is when we look at the product that we have built, the app and the website, we say, what are people doing in their analog faith experience? And how do you how do you bring that to life in the digital experience? Like you said, not everything can be reproduced digitally. And so with those things that can be, how can we do how can we use our skills? How can we be excellent in our execution of delivering the best faith experience we can digitally. And so we look at some of those analog things. So whether it's small groups or in 1 thing that we get that you don't hit a physical church, there's no need, people are actually going there, is we can actually we have an audience that uses our app, and we can actually promote certain ministries that may be closer to them so we can match them with ministries. So that's 1 benefit that we can do. We can we can recommend leaders or sermons based on topics, and sometimes those aren't, you know, necessarily close to them. But what that allows them to do is start forming relationships with these, ministries, who may they may gravitate towards because maybe this pastor does marriage really well. That's their that's their jam. They do marriage, and that's the struggle or that's what they need at that time. Or, hey. This person really helps you be a good steward of your finances, and that's the struggle you have. And you wanna figure out how do I be a good steward of my finances. Well, Dave Ramsey's, you know, he's the guy. It'll help you be a good steward. Right?
And so you could connect with people on and that's 1 of the things that I think the digital space allows for a little bit more freedom, where you can actually start getting people connected by the topics and things that concern them. Because your your local church, they may do a small group on finances, but it's once a year or once every 3 years, and you're like, hey. I kinda you know, that's something that I, you know, I need to go through or, relationships or whatever. It allows you to connect with it it allows us to have more variability in the small group or the in-depth offering that we can provide to help people go further.
And, you know, 1 of the things that, this last part, a lot of churches, they spend a lot of resources counseling people. They're counseling people on, yeah, do you have relationships, marriage, but sometimes on mental health concerns. And so this is something that, the church, they they have every pastor's basically a counselor whether they're trained or not. That's just what it is. Right? And so what we have the opportunity to do, knowing that, you know, the pandemic, it it accelerated a lot of things, some for good and some for bad. 1 of those things that's for bad is a mental health pandemic that's now occurring where people are experiencing anxiety and depression and some of these, mental health struggles that we're hearing a lot of in the news. You've even heard, you know, the governor of Texas talk about how we need to we need to provide more mental health resources for people to get, to them, before tragedies happen. And so these things are occurring. These mental health issues are occurring inside the church, and that's 1 of the unique things that we have an opportunity to do. We can have more in-depth offerings for that and allow people across the globe and across the nation to connect on these these offerings that are more tailored and specific and recommended for them to help them go deeper in their faith.
Because a lot of that maturing of discipleship is it it's not just this. It's not just engaging deeper in your faith and that relationship with Jesus on specific topics. You know, we all go through that when like, oh, I need to I need to control my, my anger or my tongue or whatever we that struggle is. We we often go to scripture and go in-depth in that, and then we pray and we meditate on that. And so we help people go deep on those subjects that matter to them, that help them grow in their discipleship. Now there's the the second part, which is the community part, which is essential. Right? And so that's where we try to facilitate, chat, connecting with your friends and family. So we're rolling out a a feature. We we rolled out the first iteration of it called community boards. And so a lot of times you hear leaderboards, you know, and you're really like, hey. You know, who's at the top? Well, we wanted to take a different spin on that. We wanted to give people something that's more communal in nature, but allows them to encourage each other in their faith where you can actually, go and you can keep, accountable with your friends and family. So, hey, you wanna pray every day? Well, we'll give you a fun way to engage with it. You go in and you do your morning prayer and you make sure you remind your, you know, your grandma. You know? Usually, grandma's the 1 reminding us, but, you know, maybe the maybe the the the tables have turned in your household.
And so, you can remind your friends and family, and we allow people to engage with their their community in these light touch ways. But, also, you can use our chat features to go in-depth and form small groups as well. And so we like to combine that personal aspect of your faith and help you go deep on topics such as mental health. And then we also try to combine those community aspects so you can go deep in that digital, that digital community that you're forming this with.
That's the double edged sword of online world. The the the mental health issue is it can make it worse or it can make it way better. If you use it for good, it can really help you. You're up at 2 in the morning and you can't sleep, and when get on your prey dot com. And and, you know, we do this with Tribe. We we have guys all around the world. There's always somebody up, something happening. So you can do that, or if you choose to dwell in darkness, it makes it worse. But this is an excellent resource that they can always have available if you have accountability or if you start to build community or conversation, you're never alone. No. No. No matter what's going on, you might be physically alone in the moment. But we know when we walk with the Lord, we're we're never alone. We might be physically alone, but, man, if I can reach out and, you know, or listen to this by accident at 1 in the morning, get on pray dot com and start start find some friends, man.
So if you're you're speaking to Ryan, a pastor, he he's not good at technology. He's got a small church of 25. He's not sure what to do. He can't reach everybody. He's not good at counseling. I'm terrible at counseling. Everybody I've given marital counseling to has left our church at some point, so I I probably am not the guy you wanna come to for that. What do you tell these guys, these pastors who are not sure what to do with what you guys do? How do you how do you start to close that gap?
Well, I would say you can reach out to us. You can reach out to ryan at pray dot com, any of the founders. You can also reach out to support at pray dot com to figure out, how you can get started on pray dot com for your church. And or you can just start sending people to pray dot com and have them go through some of the resources. And what you'll find is that they'll gravitate to certain things that, you know, you didn't you didn't realize that you, that they needed. And that's the that's the beauty of what we have is we have a large variety of Christian content, that helps people in many different areas, and we have the technology and, capabilities to get them the content that they need. And so I would say just probably the easiest thing, connect with Prey, through, support at Prey dot com or just just send them the download back.
Typically, I say, hey. Where are you gonna send us? What websites? Whatever. But I'm pretty sure we're going to pray dot com because you got everything on your website. There's not you even got LinkedIn. I feel like John Fetterman when I go to LinkedIn. You have everything on that site, including your social media. So I is there anywhere else we need to go, Ryan? You can download the app. Just search pray or pray dot com, and you'll see the pray dot com app. We try to keep it simple, pray dot com. Yeah. And that's, that's how you can start engaging with the content and learning from the best pastors out there.
Let let me clarify this in case you're related to John Fetterman. You know I always wear the hooded sweatshirt and everyone else is in suits. That's how I feel when I log in to LinkedIn. Everyone's in suits and I'm over there in my hooded sweatshirt and baseball caps. So, you got the what you got the downloads on here, you got the social medias, you got everything you need to offer. So, Ryan, appreciate you doing that. Y'all have started making some some books and we wanna talk about that with the men in the herd.
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