Welcome to the second issue of Mobile Ministry Magazine (MMM) simply titled Envisioning. There was a decent response from the year’s first issue and so we are going to continue down the same path with this package of observations and insights from the mobile ministry (#mobmin) space.
Its now a few days after Christmas, and you might have been blessed to receive a new device, a gift card to an app store or two, or just want to refresh your wares with something different. Here are some #mobmin-tuned recommendations:
Software/Services
Content
Devices/Accessories
I might just come back to this and add a few more items to it as the days continue. These were just a few of the items that have come up over the course of 2013 and been impressive in their respective contexts.
What would you recommend? Make a strong case and we’ll add it here.
As you might have noticed in that post about the sidebar additions, we’ve featured a few mobile apps which are outliers in the mobile ministry space. Not so much because they are popular, but because they do things which are uniquely mobile, uniquely faith-first, and generally, meeting a niche need square on. iPrayer kneels squarely on those points.
This really isn’t a review of iPrayer as much as its an appreciation of what it does well. Much like the 1st version of Instagram, its a mobile-first social network. Once its installed, you don’t need an account to get into it, but it does help if you plan on posting prayers and interacting with the iPrayer community.
Much like MMM, there’s only one person behind the scenes at iPrayer, and that shows in the Daily Word feature. I like that idea, though in speaking with the developer, he mentioned that its possible that iPrayer could configured differently to allow for others’s to be profiled in the Daily Word.
I’ll say though that the thing which really opened my eyes to iPrayer was the UI (user interface). When I looked at the landing screen, my first thought was multi-lingual support. There were so few words and the icon design was so clear that I instantly thought about this being a mobile community app able to serve several languages at the same time. In that convo with the developer, there were no plans to go towards other languages. But, there are other language communities present. Seriously, neat.
My iPad now gets notifications from iPrayer when new devotionals are published. Like another app we’ve reviewed – Bible Bloom – its not about an intense study, but intentional contemplation about those things God desires from us. iPrayer was designed for those folks who have a need for prayer, but might not be as connected locally as some would wish. Its a neat app/service, and one we are proud to push forward as iPrayer is developed further.
If your exposure to MMM comes via social media, email, or RSS, you do miss those occasional changes which happen on the site. With the big outage in August, we lost a lot of features, and so its been a while in getting things back. One of those features brought back is the Recommended Apps/Services in the sidebar. Hopefully, its something which can help you better understand some of the relationships we’ve forged (recently) and areas of opportunity in #mobmin for your org.
Its a listing of both Partners and Recommendations. Here are those groups currently:
Partners:
Recommendations:
There are a few more that we’ll add to this over time as we continue to rebuild and refresh. If you see an opportunity to partner with us, or believe that your app or service should be given a thumbs-up recommendation, get in touch.