There’s an App for That!

Can you believe it’s been 17 years since the iPhone was introduced? Technically, the iPhone is not considered the first smart phone. That distinction belongs to a phone designed by IBM in 1992 called the Simon Personal Computer (SPC), which was released in 1994. It’s considered the first smart phone because it was the first phone to include apps.

However, it was really the iPhone that revolutionized cell phones as we know it. Flip phones and Blackberries, which were ubiquitous up until then, are but a memory now.

Back in 2008, when smart phones were still relatively new, Apple embarked on an ad campaign that was highly successful and no doubt aided in the early lead the iPhone had over competitors in the newly created smartphone market.

The theme of the ad campaign was: There’s an app for that! Commercials touted the abundance of apps that were available for the iPhone compared to other smart phone platforms. Just about anything you might need to do with your phone, there was an app available that could do it for you.

Here’s an example of one of those early iPhone commercials:

Recently, I had my own “There’s an app for that” moment.

I was meeting with my friend Mike, a guy I’ve been coaching over the last few years. I met Mike in a grocery store parking lot during the pandemic and we’ve been connecting ever since. You can read about that story here in our January 2021 Newsletter at Lowedown.com.

Mike has a passion for basketball and after spending some time as a high school coach Mike has been trying to make the leap into the difficult world of coaching at the collegiate level.

Mike was recently hired as an assistant coach at Biola University, where he now has the opportunity to influence the young men on the team, not just in their basketball skills, but in their spiritual lives as well.

Mike and I were going over some new discipleship material I’ve been developing. The idea is to create a menu of lessons that anyone can use to help another person take concrete steps in their relationship with God. I’ve been going through the content with Mike to get his feedback and to see if this is the kind of material he might be able to use in his basketball ministry.

After we finished the content, Mike told me, “I wish I could translate this into Japanese.” Mike has a significant ministry to Japanese kids and teens both here and in Japan, through the many youth basketball camps he hosts.

He shared how he thought the content we were going over could be super helpful but he wouldn’t be able to share it with a Japanese student because he doesn’t know Japanese well enough to translate the content himself. It launched us into a conversation about how even here in Southern California, there is often a need for material to be available in multiple languages besides English.

Though my content is currently in English only, our conversation made me think about the GodTools app that Cru has created for evangelistic and spiritual conversations. 

I had assumed that Mike probably was familiar with the app and probably had it on his phone, but when I mentioned it, I found out that he not only doesn’t have the app, but he was only vaguely familiar with it.

I pulled up the app on my phone and showed him how he could have access to a number of different gospel presentations as well as a presentation on the ministry of the Holy Spirit….all at his fingertips. 

To demonstrate, I opened up the Four Spiritual Laws presentation and began to scroll through the pages.

One of the best things about the app though is not just having a gospel tract on you at all times, but the fact that you can share the presentations in any one of 90 languages. And there’s also an option to toggle the screen between 2 languages (English and Japanese for example). 

Mike was excited to learn there was an app at his disposal that would allow him to share a number of tools with his Japanese friends in their native tongue and he didn’t have to spend the money to hire a professional to translate it.

It turns out that if you want to share your faith with others, there’s an app for that. And if you need to share it in a foreign language, there’s an app for that as well!

If you haven’t downloaded the GodTools app yourself, consider adding it to the other Bible apps on your phone. Go to GodToolsapp.com for more information on the features of the app and for suggestions on how to use it in your conversations. 

Please pray for Mike as he continues to establish himself as a collegiate coach and pray for us as we seek to continue helping Young Professionals multiply their lives into others.