By Catherine Pepinster
It’s five years since Henry Costa and Ed Beccle started imagining an app that would encourage people to pray. Sceptics might have thought they were barking up the wrong tree — shouldn’t they have dreamt up, say, a way of ordering Japanese sushi takeaways, or buying solar panels?
But now it looks like their conviction that such an app has a market may have been right after all. According to a survey just published by the Church of England, secular Britain isn’t so secular as many people assume — at least as far as the younger generation is concerned. It shows that nearly half of all adults report they have offered up some form of prayer, with those aged 18 to 34 far more likely to pray than over-55s. That suggests a potential appetite for something that might help their spiritual life.
And the pair also found that investors, especially in America, were convinced they were on to something. So far, they have raised $84 million of backing towards their project, Glorify, which uses technology to provide a kind of recharging of spiritual batteries.
Glorify offers users a variety of services: daily Bible readings, guided meditations, prayer, and music. Connect with God every day, says the Glorify slogan.
According to Costa, the connections are growing fast, with 10 million downloads so far since the launch in 2020 and 2.2 million regular users who spend about three hours a day on meditation and prayer on the app. But despite that, he says, the operation is way off making a profit; it’s still running at loss and not even yet breaking even.
The investors, who include celebrities such as James Corden, Kris Jenner and Michael Bublé — who came to Glorify through investment funds they back — are going to have to be patient for longer, he says. They needn’t worry that the money is being spent on luxury office space. Glorify operates out of a former handbag factory, full of start-ups, south of the Thames in London’s gritty urban Vauxhall. It’s a few minutes’ walk west to the Oval cricket ground and south to MI6’s headquarters.
But Costa, says, there’ll be no spying on the people who sign up to the app. Glorify, he promises, is not going to make money from selling its subscribers’ data. “We don’t sell our data,” he said. “The whole nature of what we do is about a private experience.”
So what made the Glorify financial backers think that it’s worth investing such a vast amount of money, including its latest $40 million investment this March? According to Costa, they are convinced, like him and Beccle, that there is a huge untapped market out there for religion and spirituality among millennials and Generation Z.
“The trend 10 years ago was for young people to be interested in eastern religions and associated spiritual practices like yoga,” he says. “I think there has been a shift and people are now turning more to what they’re more familiar with.”
He believes Covid was the most significant moment in recent years for people’s changing spiritual interests. “People were already looking for meaning but during Covid they started going back to what they already knew and for most people that was Christianity, at least some link to it.”
Even before that, he and Beccle thought that the days of what they call ABC — Anything But Christianity — were over. Christianity , however, was becoming on trend.
“In the US, we were seeing celebrities like the Kardashians and Kanye West wanting to talk about their faith. When that happens, it opens doors. We’ve seen how it affects people street level with street fashion brands like Fear of God. People start to notice and get involved. They want to know more about faith.”
That’s America, but isn’t secular Britain very different? Costa says he’s seeing it happen here, too. “There are signs that young people are starting to think faith is cool. They emulate what others do like footballers who cross themselves at the start of matches.”
Many of the Premiership footballers who do that are Africans and Latin Americans, but Costa says he knows sports coaches who have spotted younger players in lesser leagues who are following their heroes.
According to the Very Rev Stephen Hance, national lead for evangelism and witness for the Church of England, its survey on prayer shows that young people are not just mildly interested in spirituality but are exploring it in practice.
“In an age when mindfulness and meditation are more popular than ever, prayer makes sense to people,” Dr Hance says.
It was this growing interest in mindfulness and meditation that persuaded Costa to develop a specifically Christian app, convinced that people like him wanted to find space in their life for quiet time.
“I was living with my wife in Africa and a quiet time each day was so important to us but it was hard to maintain. So, I looked at what was available online. There were mindfulness apps to help you but there was hardly anything for Christians looking for something to help them cope with an over-stimulated world. We need structure to help us find that quiet time to deal with it.”
Back in Britain, he met Beccle through mutual friends and discovered they had similar ambitions. “We believe in tech as a force for good but it was as if the tech world had forgotten the space for Christians.”
Half a dozen key contributors write Glorify’s bite-sized content. It’s unsigned and Costa declines to name them. He also declines to say how he thinks Glorify will make money, and instead talks about “bolt-ons” — services that will earn money in the future. Some revenue might also be raised through advertising. But he has decided to no longer charge for any of the material on the app.
Other apps, such as ones created by the Roman Catholic Jesuit order, don’t charge users. Another app, Pray, was launched in 2017 with a vision to become “the digital destination for faith”, according to creator Steve Gatena. One Minute Pause, founded by American Christian and therapist John Eldredge, offers moment of quiet to help people centre on God.
Costa, a businessman who has made his money through investment in other start-ups, says Glorify is not just about making money. It is also about what he believes in: it’s a business but also a missionary project.
The son of the South African banker and philanthropist Ken Costa, he was raised as a Christian, and has never, he says, had such a crisis of faith that he abandoned it. “But for me, my relationship with God was best when I had a daily quiet time. I know how hard it is to find that space in your life, how much we need that structure in our lives every day and that’s what I want to help people have with Glorify.”
