People who Inspired the App

God not only guides, he orchestrates. My experiences with diverse and deeply respected followers of Jesus have combined to inspire the app. I marvel at God’s work as I remember the many people who made pivotal insights and contributions on this journey. I want to thank each of them for their influence, known and unknown, and I honor each of them for how God has revealed his goodness through them. This blog does not include everyone who has contributed their skills and insights to the app but focuses on those who originally inspired the project design or motivation to get off the ground.

Rev. Sam Kim, Intercultural Mission Church

Sam has coached me through multiple major challenges in my life and ministry. In one difficult year, he particularly focused on biblical social skill and emotional intelligence. His support and counsel helped me appreciate the importance of Christians having personalized coaching when they’re in over their head, which led me to wonder what followers of Jesus might do with the support of coaches who could enable higher courage and capacity in following God’s call. For this reason, coaching is a central component of the app. Every pod using the app has a coach, and coaches also receive coaching.

Rev. Dr. Barbara Ettinger, East Coast Conference of ECC

Barbara coached me through the greatest leadership challenge in my life. She focused on identifying and helping me implement the innate leadership instincts and wisdom God had given me. She helped me appreciate the importance of fostering others’ gifts rather than giving them answers. For this reason, coaches for the app are encouraged to give participants as many decisions and roles as possible, as soon as possible. In addition, coach pods are designed to help coaches offer ideas and discern God’s leading rather than imposing solutions and directives.

Rev. Eva Clarke, Life Church Boston

Eva coached me through a hard year of life and ministry. She focused on keeping me grounded in the basics of prayerfulness, trust, and surrender to the Holy Spirit. Her abiding attitude of gentleness, generosity, and balance of “wise as a serpent, harmless as a dove” was a living witness to the power of the Holy Spirit to keep me grounded despite my brokenness. For this reason, one of the core values of the app is that actions are “Spirit-led,” rather than coach-imposed. The app includes multiple opportunities for prayer, discernment, Scripture discussion, and action taking in response to the Word and the Spirit’s leading.

Rev. Dr. Gregg Caruso, Vital Church Ministry

Gregg led many of the discernment teams I participated in with Vital Church Ministry, an organization that helps churches in transition, distress, or decline. Those teams would meet with church members, synthesize massive amounts of data and personal stories, and prayerfully consider recommended next steps for the church. Gregg would then present Scripture-honored and time-tested wisdom to the churches about what would help them resolve their conflicts, clarify their vision, and take vital action together.

My experience with discernment teams for Vital Church Ministry and Gregg’s observations over the years revealed how frequently churches in distress are lacking healthy pathways for spiritual formation. They either have no deliberate pathways, or their opportunities for spiritual formation are limited to information transfer. The result is church members who can articulate the core beliefs of the Christian faith but struggle to love one another or serve the community.

My experience with Vital Church Ministry and Gregg’s insights inspired the drafting of a book that would help people have a clear pathway for spiritual formation that was relational, Spirit-led, and action-oriented. The book was the precursor to the app.

Andrew Tsou, Emmanuel Gospel Center

When I worked at EGC, my colleague Andrew Tsou wrote an unpublished manifesto of sorts that identified a problem in the western church—the value of knowledge as a currency. Pastors are paid to share Biblical knowledge, Sunday school courses are offered to provide knowledge, seminaries are designed around knowledge frameworks, ordination is cenetered around proving knowledge, and spiritual formation in the churches often begins and end with information transfer. Many pastors’ primary function is to deliver a monologue every week.

Andrew traced the historical reasons for this state of affairs. The result of a knowledge-currency church is that knowledge can sometimes supersede relationships, mercy and justice, or discernment of the Holy Spirit’s leading in the Church. Currently in many corners, even long-time Christians’ lives lack the redemptive power of the gospel in their world. They don’t know how to be led by the Spirit, take action according to their faith, or share with others how the gospel has been at work in their lives.

Inspired by his insights, the app seeks to take a stand, not against Biblical knowledge, but against the neglect of relational focus, spiritual discernment, and the testimony of the faithful in word and deed. The app guides conversations for pods on journey together, with multiple opportunities for discerning the Spirit’s leading in every conversation, and the regular practice of sharing God’s movement in their lives.

Rev. Andy Ober, Intervarsity Christian Fellowship

Andy, who was pastor of the Highrock Southwest Boston church plant, invited me to serve on their advisory team, a precursor to a formal elder board. Part of the work of that team was to help develop a flexible but grounded pathway for spiritual formation. First, to define the scope of the Christian life for which we wanted to help people grow spiritually, I listed 20 life topics. These topics are designed to engage every area of life. I grouped them into areas of ever-widening scope: Connecting with God, Participating in Christian Community, Following Jesus in Society, and Joining God’s Mission in World History.

I later wrote the draft of a book with these 20 life topics, including relevant Scriptures, meditations, and suggested action steps for each topic. The goal was to give a flexible, timeless foundation for spiritual formation, even as certain topics become more urgent at certain moments in history.

The app now includes topical convos for these 20 life topics. Pods can follow Journeys (series of convo topics). They can return to foundational convo topics whenever they wish. They can do a deep dive into one topic for a time. They can do a cohort journey that goes through all 20 life topics in two years.

Rev. Drew Thurman, Renaissance Church Planting

Church planters need tools that can multiply spiritual formation. Drew led me through a cohort on missional living and encouraged me to develop a tool that people can use to help others grow spiritually. The tool started as a book, and then became the app.

The goal for the app continues to be a tool that Christians and church leaders can use to coach others in the faith in a way that can be replicated, supported, and sustainable. To achieve this, the app is used as part of a coaching community, and the goal is to help participants get to the point where they can coach pods themselves.

Rev. Tim Ghali, Grace Chapel

Tim was part of the missional living cohort I did with Drew Thurman. Tim told me about the ned as a spiritual formation groups pastor to have tools that can truly equip people to coach others in a relational and whole-life way.

As a spiritual director, previously I had focused spiritual formation on one on one conversations. But his sharing the importance of the need for group tools motivated me to design the app so it can be used by groups, in addition to one on one coaching. For this reason, the app is designed for use by pods, which can have 2 or more people.

Roselle Heckendorn, Intervarsity Christian Fellowship

As the small groups director of a church and alpha leader for many years, Roselle made an observation about the current tradition of small groups. She notices that groups tend to talk about a topic and then move on the next week without review. People seldom have the opportunity to revisit what they’ve learned or report back about actions they’ve taken in response to what they’re learning.

Her observation inspired the review-based rhythm of the conversation journeys. Not only does every convo have a followup to share about what happened after participant take their action steps. The entire journey also ends with a Celebration convo, which reviews the whole journey to synthesize insights and consider adopting regular practices.

Roselle also redsigned the order of the convo to be more smooth and consistent. As a spiritual director, she also advised that participants have a moment to listen to the Spirit before speaking into one anothers’ lives.

Meredith Wood, Congregation Lion of Judah

Meredith is a deeply prayerful woman who lives her life in radical listening and obedience to the Holy Spirit. She reminded me that the entire tenor of a group conversation can change after people have a moment to focus on the presence of God in real time.

For this reason, the app has a wealth of “God Connect” meditation options to choose from. Pods take a minute or two in quiet with a guided meditation to notice the presence of God in real time together at the start of their discussion.

Rev. Damian Long, Park Street Church

Damian listened with great interest and support to my early shpiel about the app and the spiritual formation paradigm. He immediately offered to try it with several of his spiritual formation pods, investing in a new iOS device to be able to do so. Since he bought a iPad, it was a kick in the pants to make sure my code was solid enough to work across many devices.

Damian also provided most of the design insights for the Speak Into My Life section and the Celebration convo discussion questions.

Caleb McCoy, OAK Music, Emmanuel Gospel Center

Caleb piloted a God Stories group with me and led many of the sessions. Each group meeting had a theme and we each shared something of God’s work in our lives along that theme. His collaboration in that helped me to see the value of sharing our God stories for the expansion and development of our faith, our Christian community, and our boldness to share about God with others.

Sharing God stories along a theme also inspired the practice of sharing “backstory” pieces of our spiritual journeys relevant to the convo topic of the day. Caleb also personally encouraged me to follow my passion for spiritual formation enough to give me the courage to quit my previous job to pursue it.

Saranya Sathananthan, Emmanuel Gospel Center

Saranya was one of the early beta testers and she gave vital feedback about how people of various ages might expect to use the app. Her insights led to the goal of having an API (app to app communication) with Instagram because that is currently where people already share a lot of their life stories with one another.

The app will eventually have the capacity to send stories to and from Instragram, to and from each other in pods, and to other social media so people can become more bold in sharing their God stories with their communities in various ways.

Nika Elugardo, MA State House

Nika had an unintentional positive impact on the success of the app mission long before it was a twinkle in my eye. When we worked together at Emmanual Gospel Center, she trained us all in agile methodology, a project management method that came out of software development but is now used in several domains.

Because of my experience with her in agile methodology, I have been able to plan and develop an app from conception to beta version, having never worked for a software company. Agile methodology has helped me to stay organized and (relatively) sane during a many-dimensional project.

Rosanne Moore Gridley, Larger Story

Rosanne inspired me to think beyond my original use case for the app, especially in the development of the Any Scripture convo, which allows people to use the app in conjunction with any Scripture plan they are following. This way, groups can immediately add meditation, actions steps, and story sharing to any Biblical curriculum they want to follow. People can continue to add to their spiritual photojournal even as they use other Bible study materials together.

Rosanne also inspired the idea of having optional action packs and meditation packs that other ministries might like to contribute to the app to encourage diverse kinds of action experiences.

Julie and Rick Strumfler, E3 Partners

Julie and Rick trained me in sharing my own testimony, sharing the essence of the gospel with others, and leading new believers through a non-threatening Bible discussion. I participated in a virtual mission trip in India that they led, where I observed and helped with all of these new skills. From their training and the virtual mission trip experience, I shaped my Relational Bible Reading questions and other discussion questions.

From the virtual mission trip experience, I was able to see the power of personal testimony and God stories in helping others come to faith in Jesus. This lived experience inspired the practice of personal story sharing in the app, not only as a way of helping the group get to know each other, but also as a way of helping every Christian develop comfort, skill, and experience in sharing about their life with God with others.

Betsy Neptune, Neptune Coaching

When I first considered developing an app, I realized that apps require teams, and spiritual formation paradigms require networks in which they can grow. The app was not something I could fully implement as a solo small business owner. Betsy’s entrepreneurship coaching helped me think through a viable strategy for the app to be used broadly.

We landed on finding a larger organization that could take my version and improve, scale, and multiply it for use in the US and aorund the world. The mission of the app is now one that can serve churches in Christian spiritual formation as well as frontier mission fields someday. I am freed from having to “build my brand” and instead aim to partner with an organization that already has broad connections.

Dr. Elliott Mason, Young Basile

In the early days of the iOS version development, Elliott used his background in software egineering to help me learn to think like a software engineer. He helped me learn what a troubleshooting process looks like. He served as a sounding board for my coding challenges, letting me talk it out, asking criticl questions, and testing my assumptions. There were times when I would spend two days unsuccesfully trying to resolve a bug. But after ten mintues of talking out the problem with him, and his asking a few critical questions, the solution would be clear.

Rev. Kelly Fassett, UniteBoston

Kelly and I participated in a missional living cohort together. I discussed with her the ideas of the original book and the importance of having action steps and followup conversations. We agreed on the importance of group journeys beyond information to support for trying hard things.

In addition, my conversations with her about the actions steps inspired the idea of having diverse styles of action step. Because people are different or may be in different stages in their life, suggested ideas for action steps needed to include various styles like Social, Creative, Sensory, Restful, Advocating, Studing, Speaking, Physical, and Analytical.

Mako Nagasawa, Anastasis Center

Mako is a living example to me of how the gospel taken seriously results in mercy and justice for the community. His experience living out bilical justice inspired not only the inclusion of mercy and justice as a convo topic, but also the “advocating” style of action step. Every topic now includes suggested action steps in the advocating style, so no matter what topic you’re studying, you can choose an action step that directs your energies towards justice for the community.

I believe the inclusion of justice-oriented action steps for every topic is not only biblically relevant. It also reflects Generation Z (under 25) Christians’ justifiable unwillingness to tolerate spiritual formation that neglects action to impact the community in just ways. Because Generation Z Christians are digital natives, their perspective on the usefulness and effectiveness of the app’s spiritual formation paradigm is of particular importance to me.

Krista Tippett, National Public Radio

In her long-running podcast On Being, Krista famously began her interviews asking about the interviewee’s spiritual background, however they would frame it. The incredible power of this question to get to what is most essential in a person’s story and what they value most was astounding.

My experience with her podcast inpired me to begin every convo with people sharing snapshots of their spiritual history or experience with the topic. In the interview format, Krista could give people time to explore an overview of their entire spiritual upbringing. For time’s sake in the pods, I ask people just to share a little of their “backstory” with the convo topic, and just one snapshot of that. That way, people can populate their photojournal with many snapshots of their spiritual history, categorized by topic. When they want to review their photojournal, they can look at the whole thing, or they can follow a single thread through their life by topic.

Liz Castro, Beta Tester Zero

While I was drafting the book, Liz was game to test the spiritual formation paradigm with me. From her feedback I saw some ways that my implementation might have been impractical, and I also saw ways that the God Connect meditations, actions steps, story sharing, and relational Bible reading provided a flexible framework for us to grow spiritually in ways that met each of us where we were at.

The book, and the subsequent app, would not have been developed without her willingness to work with it in its early draft state and give honest feedback on what was unclear, impractical, or most helpful.

Dr. Elisabeth McSherry, Park Street Church

One Saturday morning during the Park Street All-Church Prayer meeting, Elisabeth and I were put in a prayer breakout group. I shared with her the possibility of transitioning from a book to an app for this spiritual formation tool, and asked for prayer for guidance about that. In her prayer, she affirmed that apps are more active than books and lend themselves to active participation, whereas books are best for information.

Because the main goal of the tool is to help spiritual formation go beyond information, this was a major confirmation of the app idea. Furthermore, as she prayed, something happened where it felt as if “the weight of the glory of God fell” and it felt like I had been given a calling that I would be honored to devote my life to. That morning in prayer was a turning point for me, where I stopped working on the book, and I started designing the app.

Nancy Goon, Mass General Brigham

Nancy helped me develop my process for version testing. She helped me think in terms of how people would use the app, and how to test the app from a user’s perspective. In doing so, she helped me to hone the essential purposes of the app.

Yuna Kim, PHD Student in Sociology of Adult Development

Under construction.