Intro
2025 has been an incredible year here at Discipleship Tech. We are so thankful to the Lord for all that he has done, and we are so grateful to all of you for making it feel so rewarding. It is a real privilege to serve you all as you labour in prayer. Every year we love to look back and reflect on what God has been doing.
Stats
Although numbers on a page tell a very incomplete story, they are still a helpful way of gauging the impact of what we're doing here at Discipleship Tech:
In 2025, PrayerMate had well over 57k new downloads, meaning we are creeping up towards 675k total downloads
120k people used the app over the course of the year, and around 32k per month by December.
A whopping 22 million items were prayed for so far this year - that's 1.8 millon per month!
It continues to be awe inducing to imagine what God is doing in answer to all of these prayers!
PrayerMate v9
One of the most exciting things for us about this year was finally launching our massive new update, PrayerMate v9. Our developer Josh has spent the last two years completely rewriting the app from the ground up, to address some long-standing issues with the reliability and performance of the data syncing. It has also paved the way for a whole range of new features which we hope to work on in the year ahead, including answered prayer tracking (currently in development) and hopefully some desktop versions of the app for Windows and macOS. We are so grateful for all of you who helped beta test the new version for us - we could not have done it without your help, and we give great thanks to God for each one of you. We know that the migration was a little bumpy for one or two of you, and we thank you all for your patience in this - but at the same time we are grateful that for the vast majority the transition seemed to go straightforwardly.
This major undertaking has been made possible in no small part due to user donations - so thank you to everyone who has supported us month by month.
We loved reading reviews like these:
Advent 2025
This year we hosted 8 different daily Advent devotionals in the app, including new content from the LICC, Langham Partnership and Tearfund; plus a new "Serpent & The Seed" devotional helping you play through the whole Bible story using our new mobile game project (see below for details). We hope and pray that all of these feeds were a blessing to those who used them.
Lent: Praying the Psalms
During Lent we also had a range of daily devotionals, and around 500 people joined in with our daily "Praying the Psalms through Lent" feed, including a few questions for reflection and a short prayer each day as we worked together through Psalms 65-109. It was also great to see the return of 40acts from Stewardship, after a break since 2020.
Advanced Warning: 15 Year Celebration
If you can believe it, PrayerMate will be turning FIFTEEN years old next year, in May 2026! To celebrate, we're hoping to organise a little thanksgiving event, probably in London one Thursday evening. We'll send out a "save the date" once details are firmed up - but make sure you are on our mailing list to get notified. We might also reach out to ask for some video testimonials - we'd love to be able to celebrate the amazing PrayerMate community in that way once again!
The Serpent & The Seed
It wasn't just PrayerMate that had a big launch in 2025: after more than four years of development, we also finally launched our Bible overview mobile game project, The Serpent & The Seed. This is intended to help engage people who would never normally open a Bible, that they might discover God's big plan of salvation for themselves. We have been SO encouraged to see how the feedback from people who have played it, and how it seems to have resonated with people.
Here's an end-of-year devlog video to give you a flavour of the progress that we've made:
Spring Harvest and Big Church Festival
It was wonderful to be able to launch the game at Spring Harvest in Minehead:
We were especially touched at everybody's amazing entries to our "fan art" competition:
Then it was incredible to be at the Big Church Festival with 35,000 others, and to see our video on the main stage:
These were both excellent opportunities to connect with the public and raise awareness of the game.
Andy also had the opportunity to visit Grand Rapids, Michigan for the Christian Game Developers Conference and RealmMakers Expo. This was a really encouraging chance to connect with our Christian game developers, and provided lots of food for thought for future developments.
Evangelistic Course
One of the absolute privileges of 2025 was getting to lead three non-Christian guys through a three week course where they would play a bit of the game at home, then we'd meet up in a relaxed setting to talk about what they'd played and read some of the key Bible passages. They absolutely LOVED it, and it was such a joy being able to get the Bible open with them and have some really valuable discussions.
We would LOVE to find five people willing to take part in a "pilot scheme" trying this with your own friends. You could be a teenager meeting in a coffee shop, or a mum doing this with your friends, or grab a bunch of house mates.... there's so many different settings where this could work, and it's a really easy invite (you're just asking them to play a game and then chat about it!) Please do get in touch if this is something you'd be open to exploring, and we can share more of the details in the new year.
We've had a study guide beautifully designed to go with it, with the Bible passages and discussion questions all lined up ready for you:
Awards
Another real encouragement was the way that The Serpent & The Seed was recognised outside of the Christian bubble. Firstly we had a wonderful writeup in PocketGamer (as well as in Christian outlets too like The Gospel Coalition) but then we were amazed to be named as a Finalist for "Audio Design" by the TIGA Games Industry Awards 2025, alongside the likes of giants of the games industry like Monument Valley 3 and Sony Interactive Entertainment. Andy & Woody had a wonderful time in London celebrating:
Financial Giving
All of the above would simply not have been possible without the generous support of so many backers who have financially supported Discipleship Tech as we work on PrayerMate and our other projects. To be completely honest, things were very close to the wire at the start of 2025, and it was only thanks to some donors that we were able to finish off The Serpent & The Seed and get it live.
So far in 2025:
- Around 72% of our income came from user donations/in-app patrons
- £82.6k donations
- 276 regular monthly donors (e.g. PayPal/Stewardship/Patreon/Stripe) plus in-app patrons
We cannot overstate what a blessing this has been to us, helping us to continue to invest in making improvements to PrayerMate and getting The Serpent & The Seed out there. We have great plans for 2026, but it's all in the Lord's hands, and we can only do it with your support. If you are able to consider making a regular monthly donation, or one off, please go to our website for details of how to set one up.
We would love to be able to grow the team in 2026, possibly looking for some kind of marketing help, and somebody to help churches and charities make the most of our apps. But we could only do this if we managed to grow the income of the charity. We would really value your prayers in this.
Conclusion
We know that "unless the Lord builds the house, the builders labour in vain". Everything listed above is only by the grace of God. We are so thankful to him for the privilege of being involved in this ministry. And we are so thankful for all of you, because you are what makes it worthwhile. Thank you so much, and we pray that you have a blessed Christmas, celebrating the birth of our saviour, Jesus.
Keep praying,
Andy Geers
Discipleship Tech CEO
PrayerMate is a free app to help you be consistent in prayer. It is a ministry of Discipleship Tech, a Charitable Incorporated Organisation, Registered as a Charity in England and Wales (No: 1178838)