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App review: Thy Kingdom Come, and Daily Worship

18 May 2018

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THE support for the initiative Thy Kingdom Come is phenomenal: from Catholics and Orthodox to Pentecostals and Charismatics: churches around the world are forming this wave of prayer.

Many will be helped by the official Thy Kingdom Come (TKC) app. Produced for Android and iOS by SPCK, it was released only on Wednesday of last week, 24 hours before it was to be used. It is not the only resource produced for TKC: the others are on the dedicated website thykingdomcome.global.

Just as the initiative is inter­national, the app is multilingual: the first thing is to select whether you want to use it in English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Kiswahili, Korean, or Welsh. One of the aims of TKC is that Christians pray for five people whom they wish to come to faith; and, having selected the language, you are asked to input the names of five people for whom you want to pray, and then the time you want to receive a daily notification.

The app provides several resources to help people to pray: these include video reflections, including youth videos, a novena, or a mini-liturgy containing a brief Bible reading and prayers, a brief text thought, the names of the five people you are praying for, audio podcasts, and images by the artist Ian Pentney.

The app is free to download and use; and is a very simple, easy daily reminder to pray. It will help those for whom daily prayer is difficult; and — being for ten days — is short enough that people who do not pray regularly are unlikely to feel that they have failed by not keeping it up. On the contrary, it has the potential to help people to begin a daily prayer routine.

 

ON THAT theme, the Church of Ireland last week launched its first app: Daily Worship. Described by the C of I as “bringing the Book of Common Prayer into the smart­phone era”, the app is essentially an electronic service-book.

My earliest recollections of using the Church of England’s Prayer Book when I was a young teenager was getting lost as the page turned for the scripture readings, the psalms, the collects, and so on. I don’t know whether the Church of Ireland’s printed version was similar in style to the C of E’s; but there is no risk of getting lost with this app.

When you open the app, you can select from a menu of services: daily prayer for morning and even­ing, a late evening office, holy communion, and compline. The app then provides everything that you need, including the allotted Bible readings, collects, and canticles from the C of I’s lectionary.

It is simple to use, and options include downloading data for local storage: this means that the readings and services are available even when you are offline. Daily Worship costs 99 pence and is available on both Android and iOS.

ireland.anglican.org

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