Prayer App ‘Hallow’ Surpasses 100 Million Prayers Worldwide
By Movieguide® Staff
Hallow, a prayer and meditation app created by 29-year-old Alex Jones, recently reached the 100 million prayer mark worldwide.
Jones launched the app in 2018 and said that Hallow has 3.75 million downloads. Jones added that he wanted to connect faith and technology, mimicking apps like Calm but with a prayerful purpose.
“I thought they were super helpful tools to learn meditation within the comfort of your own home,” Jones told Fox News. “Every time I would meditate, my mind would feel pulled toward something Christian. An image of the cross, or the Trinity, or the Holy Spirit, which I thought was very strange.”
“I would ask, ‘Hey, is there any way there’s some intersection here between this whole faith thing and this meditation thing?'” he added. “They all laughed at me and said, ‘Yeah, we’ve been doing it for about 2,000 years. You’ve probably heard about it. It’s called prayer.'”
With newfound intentionality to his faith and a reconnection to his Christian roots, Jones set out to create something that encouraged others to pray.
The name, Hallow, comes from the Lord’s Prayer, which reads: “Our Father, hallowed be thy name.”
“It just changed my life — it brought me to tears,” Jones said. “It brought me back to my faith. It changed everything about what I value and the most important part of who I am.”
“Is God calling me to be holy? Am I to be helping other people grow in virtue?” he asked himself.
With little coding experience, Jones said that the app’s first iteration was rough around the edges.
“I knew how to code a little bit, and so I coded the first version of it,” he said. “It was terrible, but I used it and I thought it was decently helpful.”
Soon after, he discovered that his family and friends found the app helpful and that it even helped his Aunt overcome the grief of losing her only son.
“If I spent the rest of my life and all of my retirement savings, and God was able to do one more thing like this through the app, it will have been infinitely worth it,” he said.
Jones explained that Hallow shouldn’t act as a replacement for church or other times of fellowship and worship but supplement it.
“Our lowest usage day is on Sundays — people are going to church,” he said. “We encourage them to go to church on Sunday and not use the app. But throughout the week, it’s a really helpful way to try to build a consistent habit of prayer.”
“You’re being led in prayer in a structured, guided way that makes it a lot easier to spend time in silence — that can be pretty intimidating to do on your own,” he added.
According to Jones, the average user is around the age of 34.
“We have users like me, who have young families, and teenagers who want to build habits, and we’ve got folks who are retirees or who are nearing the end of their life who are trying to use that time to dive deeper into their relationship with God,” he said. “God can reach out to everybody at any stage of their lives.”
The app launched just before the COVID-19 pandemic, but Jones said God’s timing for the creation of Hallow could not have been more perfect.
“As COVID went on and many were suffering with the loss of loved ones or sickness themselves, Hallow was a place where they were able to find that solace,” he said.” You had a lot of folks who were angry. Global political crises, inflation, the economy — there were a bunch of things that are stressors for folks. They were feeling frustrated and hopeless.”
But with Hallow, users can “find endurance and perseverance, and a sense of peace away from the division and the anger of the world that we live in,” he added.
Movieguide® previously reported on actor Mark Wahlberg who uses the app in his relationship with God:
Actor Mark Wahlberg says a prayer of gratitude every morning because he knows “faith is the most important thing” in life.
“Faith is the most important thing. That’s how I start my day every day,” said the INSTANT FAMILY star in an interview with Caron Butler for Tuff Juice podcast. “By the time I open my eyes, before I turn the light on or do anything, I am kind of saying my prayers. I go in my prayer room and take that 15 or 20 minutes to express how grateful I am,” Wahlberg continued.
Wahlberg has starred in major Hollywood movies like TRANSFORMERS and LONE SURVIVOR, but posits that he knows God provided him a platform for a reason.
“I know that God didn’t bless me with all this to say, ‘forget about where you came from and just go off and do you and have a great life,'” Wahlberg said. “There is now an opportunity and responsibility to give back and inspire other people to say no matter where you come from or what obstacles you may face, if you actually go and do the right thing…good things will happen for you.”