Christian Apps Are Moving from ‘Pray More’ to ‘Calm Down’

New mindfulness resources help users find rest in God.

Rachael Reynolds is a busy wife and mom of three who, like many parents, suddenly has been tasked with home-schooling her children and managing the anxiety of a pandemic.

Reynolds, 34, also is a registered nurse and works three or four night shifts a week in the labor and delivery department at a Texas hospital. That adds the stress of keeping her patients and herself safe from the spread of the novel coronavirus.

In those times when she has a few moments to herself while her kids are napping, or when she’s trying to drift off to sleep as everyone else is beginning a new day, Reynolds finds herself tapping on one of the meditation apps on her phone—like Abide, which calls itself the No. 1 Christian meditation app to “stress less and sleep better.”

“Grounding myself with the Word of God, and the truth and the promises he offers me there, I find to be much more effective for grounding myself mentally and spiritually,” she said.

Meditation and mindfulness apps have boomed in the last decade, part of the trend of the year that Apple’s App Store noted in 2018: self-care apps, particularly those focused on mental health.

The App Store deemed Calm, which describes itself as the No. 1 app for sleep, meditation and relaxation, its 2017 app of the year.

Christian meditation apps—with names like Abide, Pray, One Minute Pause, Soultime, Soulspace, and, for Catholics, Hallow—have entered the scene more recently, adding prayer and Scripture to the digital landscape of soft voices and nature sounds.

Several of those Christian apps have reported spikes in searches for meditations on topics like anxiety since the pandemic started.

“It’s sort of really exploding right now,” said ...