Instapray logo | From the Instapray app
“I’m new to Instapray, praying for my first experience on Instapray.”
It’s the standard text entered for your first time using Instapray, the app founded by Stanford grad Fryderyk Ovcaric and backed by is-he-a-Christian venture capitalist Peter Thiel, among others. (Answer: probably.) I can change the text of my prayer, mark it as answered, leave a comment, or add a hashtag. Once I’ve written the prayer, I can easily share it on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or via email; it automatically gets sent out to the Live Feed that all Instapray users see when they log in.
As long as people have been praying, they have also been asking for prayer from one another. The New Testament of the Bible is full of requests from Paul and others to pray for them; contemporary places of worship often offer time in their services to pray for the specific needs of their parishioners. Instapray makes sense as a digital heir to that tradition.
The prayers are often little more than what another app might call a status update: Users post pictures of their pets who are sick, share Bible verses, recommend churches. One member from Arkansas posted a picture of his drivers’ permit test and said that, on his 6th try, he “asked God to give me the victory and He gave it to me even though I hadn’t looked at the material for weeks until today and stayed up until 3 AM last night.” An older woman was having trouble with a friend; another woman asked for prayer for her family after the death of her brother; one man prayed for favor in his relationship with his boss so that he could get the schedule he wanted.
Instapray isn’t affiliated with a particular religion, although the number of Bible verses referenced make it clear that it is popular among Christians. Ovcaric presented the app at the Values Voters Summit last year, where he mentioned that it was inspired by the “Insta-Prayer” program Jim Carrey’s character created in the movie “Bruce Almighty.” It makes sense–when I opened the app, I immediately thought of the scene from that movie where Carrey hears a jumble of prayers for the first time:
Instapray is more than a little bit overwhelming–it’s cluttered and hard to figure out where your attention should go in a sea of prayer requests. Prayer can, apparently, bring out some of the worst in people; when I logged on I immediately saw an image contrasting Caitlyn Jenner (“Accepted for being transgendered”) and Tim Tebow (“Hated for being Christian?”). Political statements disguised as prayer are nothing new, but Instapray can spread those messages on a whole different level. At its worst, Instapray can be like the worst possible version of Pinterest.
But at its best, there is something good about being reminded that when we pray, we’re connected to a much larger group of people all over the world. An app can’t take the place of the church, and it can’t take the place of praying with someone in person, and it still feels a little goofy to claim that God gave you victory on your drivers’ test the sixth time through just because you prayed the right prayer. The logo is cheesy and Instapray will be impossible to monetize. The impulse, though, is a lovely one–to connect people in need of something beyond what they can create for themselves. Our best and worst impulses are on display when we pray; only now they’re available with the press of a button.
