Andy

Meet Andy Geers, the developer of a ground-breaking new app, PrayerMate. If you’ve ever promised to pray for someone, then promptly forgotten, Andy can help you.

WEC: Start by telling us a bit about yourself. How did you become a Christian? What's your professional background?

AG: I had the great privilege of growing up in a prayerful Christian home, where I was taught the Bible and taught how to program computers. Both my faith and my interest in computers blossomed through my teenage years and especially at university, where I studied Computer Science and got very involved in the student work at my church. After doing a church apprenticeship down in Cornwall, I moved to London and have been working as a software developer ever since.

WEC: You’re the Developer for something called PrayerMate. Tell us about it.

AG: For years, I'd been using lists to help me pray. But I struggled to keep them up to date and there always seemed to be this disconnect between the people on my lists and my email inbox full of unread prayer newsletters. When I used an iPad for the first time, it occurred to me that an app could help solve these problems. PrayerMate is an app designed to help you pray for the people and causes you care about. It's essentially a collection of digital ‘prayer lists’ – e.g. family members, colleagues, prayers from the Bible, various needs around the world (including organisations like WEC) – and every day, the app picks one or two to pray for, from each list. It helps you pray more widely and in a more informed way.

WEC: Why does prayer matter? Why do you care about it so much?

AG: Martin Luther said, ‘To be a Christian without prayer is no more possible than to be alive without breathing.’ Expressing our dependence on God is the very essence of Christian faith. The glorious truth is that God loves to hear and answer our prayers! And as we express our trust in our loving heavenly Father by praying to him, we get the encouragement of seeing those prayers being answered – even if it isn't always in exactly the way we expect or hope for.

WEC: What's next for you? (And for PrayerMate?)

AG: PrayerMate’s mission is to mobilise the Christian church to pray, and I'm still just scratching the surface of how it fulfils that mission. I'm keenly aware of all kinds of ways it could be refined and ironically it doesn't yet address the very problem I set out to solve: helping me to use the prayer newsletters that people send me. So what’s next for me is to figure out how I can further develop the app while also putting food on my family’s table – and I welcome people’s prayers for that!

If PrayerMate sounds useful, you can download the free app to your Android or iPhone. And once you have the app, you can sign up to the WEC UK prayer feed, among a host of others. Find out more here.