Research note · history
Each generation of Bible and faith technology has served people better than the last, and each has imported the reigning technology of its time. Knowing which wave a feature comes from helps a team ask what it was built to do, and whether that serves the reading and practice it now sits in.
At a glance
Waves overlap: Pray As You Go predates the smartphone wave, and every earlier wave is still in use.
The waves
Floppy disks and CD-ROMs: Bible-Reader, QuickVerse, The Bible Library, CDWord, early Logos.
What it gave
Search, concordances and original-language tools for pastors and students.
What it carried in
The implied reader was a scholar at a desk; nothing else was imagined.
Bible Gateway (1993), then online and desktop study libraries.
What it gave
Free access to many translations, side-by-side comparison, copy and paste for sermon preparation.
What it carried in
Still a reference for people who already read; the page was a digital desk.
YouVersion among the first App Store apps in July 2008; reading plans, verse images, sharing, streaks.
What it gave
Scripture in every pocket, plans that give a rhythm, sharing with friends. Over a billion installs.
What it carried in
The social-media playbook of the time: streaks, notifications, badges and daily-active targets applied to Scripture.
Pray As You Go (2006) and, later, Hallow, Pray.com, Dwell and Glorify; Hallow reached No. 1 on Apple’s App Store on Ash Wednesday 2024.
What it gave
Prayer and Scripture through the ears; guided practice, music and silence; a far larger audience than the religious niche assumed.
What it carried in
New format, same behavioural design: streaks, challenges and engagement targets carried over.
Magisterium AI, Bible Chat, BibleAI and many others answer questions in natural language; some add character chats.
What it gave
A newcomer can ask in their own words and get a response grounded in the text, at any hour.
What it carried in
Mostly a chatbot added to the existing engagement model; new questions of authority, sources, care and data.
The pattern underneath
Desktop and web Bibles did not gamify Scripture. From the smartphone wave on, streaks, notifications, badges and daily-active targets came in with the platforms, built for advertising products where time in the app is the goal. Formation asks for depth of encounter, not frequency of opens.
Practice, habit research and consent →Audio and contemplative apps changed how Scripture and prayer are received, but often kept the same behavioural design. Most AI apps add a chatbot to that model, answering on demand rather than accompanying someone over time.
Studies of YouVersion describe its design as persuasive technology that trains particular reading habits, and evangelical builders as the driving force behind the digital Bible. Neither is a criticism by itself; both are reasons to ask what a feature trains people to do.
Digital formation research →Rejecting pressure can tip into pure affirmation: a companion that never challenges is not a spiritual guide. The design question is neither gamified guilt nor empty validation, but grace that still tells the truth.
A parallel strand
Some tools never adopted engagement mechanics and still reached very large audiences.
Launched by the British Jesuits on 1 March 2006 as a Lent trial: a daily ten-minute audio prayer with music, Scripture and Ignatian questions. Used tens of millions of times a year, with no streaks or badges.
About Pray As You Go →Daily lectio and examen rhythms, and church-based formation courses, that treat technology as something to be formed around rather than optimised for.
Listening guide →A fixed, shared practice rather than a personal score; an ending rather than a feed; the same content for everyone, which keeps them simple and also means they cannot adapt to a person.
Reading history →Know the person. The open question for the next wave is whether a tool can remember and adapt with care, as a spiritual director listens, without the surveillance and pressure the earlier waves imported.
Sources in AI answers →Take into your next review
Which wave did this feature come from, and is it still doing the job it was built for?
Exercise
List your product’s ten most visible features. Mark each with the wave it comes from and the business model that wave assumed. For each, ask whether it serves the reading or practice it now sits in, and what you would design if you started from that practice instead.
Sources
The four-wave framing comes from Tobias Treppmann’s Kairos research on missional AI (section 1.3). This note adds the desktop era, corrects the start of the web wave to 1993, and checks dates and figures against the sources above. Installs, rankings and usage numbers are as reported by the organisations or news outlets named; waves overlap, and the boundaries are an interpretive aid, not a precise history.
