Prayer can lead to life-changing outcomes. In our studies at Abide, prayer has given people peace, guidance and freedom from things like worry and addiction. But it turns out that four out of five church-going adults aren’t happy with their prayer lives. They wonder, “What do I say to God? How can I hear God? How can I feel close to God?” About 100 million Americans want to grow in the life-changing power of prayer but don’t know how.
I used to work at Google and spent years tackling big, audacious problems. Google’s basic formula is simple and effective. Find really important problems. Prototype smart solutions. Test until you find something that real users find far better than their current options. Always let data prove what works. I saw this formula succeed for search, maps, Android and more.
Then a group of us from Google, Tesla and other tech companies started wondering, “Could this approach work for spiritual problems? Did people have big spiritual challenges? Could digital products help to solve them? We started researching and running surveys to uncover practical, spiritual solutions to problems.” Prayer was a big one. We found many powerful stories of deep, personal change through prayer. But for many others, prayer was hard. Even frustrating. They wanted help praying. It turns out that even Jesus’ disciples ran into this issue two thousand years ago, saying, “Lord, Teach us to pray.”
But, can digital products engage us with an invisible God? After all, isn’t prayer a sacred exercise? Can data-driven learning help solve sacred problems? Some people find this idea ridiculous. One Googler laughed in disbelief. “You want to digitize prayer?” My response: Let the data prove it out.
We started with a simple set of assumptions. The Bible is the most widely published, read and prayed book in history. We assumed that the Bible described effective ways to pray, and we started testing them. We took traditions that have helped people find peace, purpose and strength for thousands of years and tried adapting them to modern life.
The concept of applying scripture to life questions has deep, personal roots for me. When I was 20 and studying economics at the University of California at Berkeley, I encountered a Bible passage in Luke where Jesus told 70 of his followers to take no money or stuff and to share the good news of God’s plan with others. Jesus tells his followers to find a person of peace who will welcome them, giving them food and a place to sleep. Feeling inspired through prayer, I tried it. I hitchhiked into San Francisco with no food or money. Within a day, a gifted writer and musician offered to let me stay in his home. He bought me food. He gave me a spot to sleep. Surprisingly, he was someone who felt persecuted by Christians. He was gay, and ethnically Jewish. Twenty years later, we are still good friends. The passage held true for me, but in ways some people might not expect.
SPECIAL COVERAGE: The power of prayer: Enhance your life
If you believe an idea is valuable, you try it.
So, what works for prayer? We tested liturgical prayers, free-form prayers, Psalms and reflective questions. We created text, video, audio and multimedia experiences and put them in front of sample users. One test gave extraordinary results. It looked like digital could help us encounter the divine.
In one test, we recorded topical audio prayers using scripture and sent them through email to people who needed prayer on that topic. Ten minutes later, I got a reply from a vice president at Dell. “Neil, this is the best piece of digital content I’ve ever received. You made my week!” Just minutes later, another from a startup founder and ex-Googler: “This tingles of product-market fit.” We ran blind tests on hundreds of American Christians. Then thousands. Now over a million people have prayed through audio prayers on Abide. And the life-changing power of encountering God holds true for a strong percentage of our users. A third of the people who listened to a two-minute audio prayer from Abide said they received divine guidance.
There are two opposing ways to interpret this kind of result: either these participants are misguided, or God gave them guidance.
There have been amazing, spiritual elements to our journey. A man known for prophetic gifts — someone who knew nothing about our project — prayed over me in 2013. He specifically said that God wanted to use our team to create a prayer platform that would help people experience God’s promises. “I just keep hearing the word platform, platform, platform,” he said. “I don’t know what this means.” Every day, by faith, our team is still learning what that means.
One finding is consistent. The single, biggest driver of satisfaction in prayer is simple. It’s speaking with God. People who talk and listen to God during their prayers on Abide are five times more likely to be satisfied than people who did not. Our data suggests that if you want a satisfying prayer life, start by having real conversations.
Try a prayer yourself. You might find it life-changing.
• Neil Ahlsten is co-founder and CEO of Carpenters Code, which has built Abide, a smartphone app for guided prayer. Before Google, Mr. Ahlsten worked for the U.S. Department of State in Darfur and served in hot spots across Africa for Food for the Hungry and the World Bank.
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