Faith and Technology: How Ryan Beck's Journey Led to PRAY.COM's Mental Wellness Mission

Key Takeaways

1. From Challenge to Transformation: Ryan's journey from troubled youth and incarceration to faith leader and tech innovator demonstrates how life's lowest moments can become turning points for profound transformation.
2. The Power of Mentorship: Ryan's story emphasizes the critical importance of positive male role models and mentorship, especially for young men without father figures—a theme that resonates with his attraction to wisdom literature like Proverbs.
3. Digital Faith Destination: PRAY.COM serves as a comprehensive digital resource for faith, offering everything from Bible readings by James Earl Jones to spoken word poetry versions of Proverbs and guided sleep meditations set to scripture.
4. Daily Habit Formation: The app's most common user feedback highlights how it helps people develop consistent daily prayer and devotional habits, which strengthens their relationship with God.
5. Prayer as Mental Health Tool: Supported by scientific research, including studies cited from Dr. Lisa Miller's book "The Awakened Brain," spiritual practices like prayer can reduce vulnerability to anxiety and depression by up to 90%.
6. Real-World Impact: PRAY.COM has received powerful testimonials, including from a law enforcement officer who decided against suicide after receiving a notification about a Sunday Service message through the app.‍
7. Science-Backed Faith: PRAY.COM is collaborating with universities including Harvard, Biola, and Hope College on clinical trials to scientifically document the app's mental health benefits.

Full Interview

Dr. Lauren Deville: Welcome back to another episode of Christian Natural Health. Today, I am excited to have Ryan Beck with us. Ryan is the cofounder and chief technology officer of PRAY.COM, the world's number one app for daily prayer and faith-based audio content. PRAY.COM is driven by a mission to grow faith, cultivate community, and leave a legacy of helping others. Beck brings experience in computer science, software engineering, and theological studies to his role as chief technology officer. He helped start PRAY.COM in 2016. Welcome, Ryan. Thank you so much for joining us.

Ryan Beck: Thank you so much for having me, Dr. Lauren. I appreciate it, and I'm looking forward to the conversation.

Dr. Lauren: Yeah. Me too. So you have an amazing testimony of how you found the Lord. I hope that you could start with that.

Ryan: Yeah. I'd love to. Thank you for giving me the opportunity. My life, I wasn't raised Christian. I was raised by a single mom. I started off in Norwalk, California, which is just there in Los Angeles. And my mom moved us out into the suburbs, Thousand Oaks. Nice area, rated number one, number two, safest place in the US many years going. She wanted to give me a better opportunity than she had. She had a relatively rough upbringing in a relatively rough neighborhood, and so she wanted to give me a better opportunity.

So when I was young, we got a chance to move out there, and, you know, she raised me to have, you know, to be kind and nice, good work ethic, and we lived in a relatively low-income area and so she did what she could to provide. Usually, we're just renting rooms and stuff like that from other people because that's all she could afford as a single mom.

And, you know, during that time, about going from junior high to high school, I started having a lot more free time. You know? I didn't go to after-school programs. My mom, she couldn't afford them anymore, and there wasn't anything really that was provided by the city that I could go to anymore because of my age. And so that was similar for all the kids in our area, and most of us were products of broken families. And most of us had single moms that worked all the time to support us. And so we're just a bunch of kids running around, you know, trying to figure out how to be men in the world without that guidance. And we made a lot of dumb decisions. And most of us ended up in gangs and drugs, unfortunately.

And so, in high school, we got involved in gangs and drugs, and at 18, I was actually arrested for sales and transportation of narcotics. That was a very traumatizing time for my mom, obviously, and for me, it was kind of what I expected. I was forming my own path. I was trying to figure out how to be a man in this world, and this just seemed like a practical outcome, not something that I was trying to avoid of what I was doing. And it's giving me street cred, it's making me tough, but it turned out to be one of the best things that could ever happen to me.

During that time, I got to reflect. I got to contemplate on my life choices, and I was very fortunate to go into jail and be surrounded by older men who looked at me and said, "What are you doing? Why do you wanna end up like us? You have your future ahead of you."

And someone asked me this. They said, "Do you wanna be a big shot on a golf course or a big shot in the pen?" And when he said that, I said, "I get what you're saying. I don't like golf, but I get the point."

And so I really took that to heart, and I was very fortunate because a lot of these guys—some of them were Christian, some of them weren't, and some of them were giving me scriptures to read. And God was stirring in my heart. I was curious to learn about Christianity, about Jesus, who he was. I didn't necessarily believe in Jesus.

And it was one night, I remember I was reading some scripture, and I was praying. I said, "God, you know, my heart's hard. I just don't believe in Jesus." And that's very Christianese language if you're familiar with the Christian culture. I wasn't engulfed in it at the time. I didn't ever use that language, but that was the language I used at that time.

And I woke up the next morning. I had this profound confidence, hard to explain, but I knew Jesus was the one I was supposed to follow. And from that moment on, God continued to, through his providence, direct me, through interactions with new friends or old friends that he had actually transformed, and helped develop me into the person I am today.

I was released about two weeks after that, three weeks after that, and my neighbor, she was my mom's age. She saw all this going on. The cops raided my house. It was a big deal. It was traumatic for my mom. And she saw all that happen. She saw all the hoodlums coming in and out of my house, but she had a stirring on her heart, and she asked me, "You wanna go to church?" And I said, "You know what? I've been looking for a church."

And when you're released from jail, it's very common that you go back. Right? Because you go back to what you know. You go back to the friends that you have. And it's not like you're better than your friends—you're in the same mess together. You're all trying to figure out life together. And it was because she asked me to do that. She gave me an outlet outside of what I had known to be normal. And I started to develop new friends, started developing community at church. I started running into old friends.

And so I had the amazing opportunity after serving at the church just through volunteer activities to go to Bible college. That church's pastor, Pastor Rob McCoy, actually sponsored me to go to Bible College. So I went there two years and the deal was I would work two years in the ministry. So I did that. I trained to be a minister. I really loved it. It helped me lay a foundation of virtues and ethics that I didn't lay as an adolescent. And so I got to lay this great framework. I served in the ministry, loved it.

I realized being a pastor is not for me. I'm not necessarily called to be a pastor. And as much as I love the church, I had the opportunity to actually go and finish a degree in computer science and philosophy. I love philosophy—one day I'll get to hopefully retire and just philosophize. But in the meantime, I'm putting the computer science degree to work.

I have had the amazing opportunity to connect that skill set with my passions and my purpose, with faith. And I did that with Mission India at the beginning, out of college. And then I got to reconnect with my friend and now business partner Steve Gatena who's the CEO of PRAY.COM back in 2016. He was All-American. I was America's Most Wanted, so—yeah, we got to reconnect. We went to junior high and high school together.

So we got to reconnect. He told me about PRAY.COM and how he just was thinking about starting this company, and I said, "You know, I'm in. Let me know how I can help." And that was 2016, and now it's 2022. The rest is kinda history. We're able to grow PRAY.COM from an idea to the number one app in daily prayer and faith-based audio content now.

So super excited what we're able to do. I'm very privileged and honored to be here and also to just be able to tell the story of how God has transformed my life, and also how he's helped me rethink about life and how to establish inner peace and mental wellness in my own life and practice and how we can actually do that at PRAY.COM.

Dr. Lauren: Yeah. I love it. That's so amazing. I love how, you know, God has all of these good works prepared in advance for us, and yet he had such a long journey for all of us to get us from point A to point B to actually be walking with him at the point where he can use us. But he had all of these things laying in place for you in order to get you to where you are today. That's so encouraging. I love it.

And so, tell us a little bit about your vision for PRAY.COM, where you at now, and how it's gonna help. Specifically, you're mentioning a lot of the mental health aspect of how that helps believers to kinda have that resource. What's the vision for it?

Ryan: Yeah. So at PRAY.COM, we're building the digital destination for faith. We believe in helping people grow their faith and cultivate community. And the way we do that is through a lot of scriptural passages, and we do that through audio content, video content, and reading material.

And we just released something called God's Wisdom, 31 Days of Proverbs. And what that is is a new format on timeless wisdom, basically. It's written in spoken word poetry. It's developed in a modern format by a pastor named Zach Schallaberger out of Southern California here in Santa Barbara, amazing guy. And what he's done there is taken these timeless wisdoms, written them in spoken word poetry to help us contemplate, to meditate, and to connect with that spiritualness inside of us, but also to utilize that wisdom of Proverbs to form that relationship with God.

And so one thing that I find very promising about a lot of our content is we are enabling people to form a relationship with God with their phone, and so people can be on the go. They can open it up, read the Bible, but listen to stuff, meditate on the word of God, and form that relationship.

And as we exit, hopefully, the physical pandemic, we're still in the midst of a mental health pandemic. Right? That is plaguing us. There's a statistic that came out that in January of 2019 to June 2019, 11 percent of us in the US experienced some sort of anxiety or depression. It jumped to 41 percent according to this study in 2021.

We've seen a drastic increase, and this is what I love about Proverbs because Proverbs tells us in Proverbs 3 it tells us about how the wisdom of God brings peace, inner peace amongst turmoil, whether it's external turmoil or internal turmoil. And so Proverbs helps us to navigate life's challenges and helps us maintain mental wellness.

I love the mental wellness. Maybe we can get into in a little bit. There's a book by Dr. Lisa Miller out of Columbia University called The Awakened Brain. I think it's a phenomenal book and she goes into spirituality and the impact on mental wellness. But, yeah, that's kind of how I see our content helping us with mental health.

Dr. Lauren: That's awesome. And so you chose Proverbs specifically because it's really practical. Right? Like, so that there's, you know, teaching people wisdom. And I think it's really interesting that you were talking about in your story how you didn't have a dad and you were looking for these older men to kind of pour into you. And then once you got to church, you started laying the foundation you didn't have when you were younger. And Proverbs is like, you know, the guidance of Solomon, the wisest man who ever lived, to tell us how we should live our lives, and that maybe had something to do with what attracted you to that.

Ryan: Yeah. Very cool.

Dr. Lauren: So you have that kind of content. What else is on PRAY.COM?

Ryan: So we have a range of biblical content from the Bible. So Bible in here. So if you just wanna go through the Bible in here, we have that with James Earl Jones, which is that's my favorite content. So you get Darth Vader, you know, reading you the Bible.

I don't know if there's any trademarks there. So James Earl Jones reads the Bible who also reads Darth Vader. And so I love that. We have Sleep Psalms which is another way for you to meditate on the word of God to help you deal with anxiety and insomnia to help you fall asleep to the word of God. And we have kids stories for parents to listen with their kids. And we have music.

And then also one area in which we're getting more and more content is we have all these amazing teachers out there, and what we're helping them do is we're helping them reach an audience on PRAY.COM. So we have amazing teachers coming on the platform to give their messages.

We have something called the Sunday Service. It sounds—it is what it sounds like. It's a Sunday service and we have teachers come on every Sunday and they teach a message. And we also—you can go and you can listen to tons of faith podcasts on there as well.

Dr. Lauren: Fantastic. That's amazing. And what kind of feedback are you getting from the listeners?

Ryan: So I think the number one feedback that we get is how it helps people form a daily habit.

Dr. Lauren: Awesome.

Ryan: This is very important for the Christian—is developing this daily rhythm, this daily devotional, this daily habit to communicate with God. Communication is something so important with the Christian, and it's something that sets us apart from other religions. Right? We have this personal God who we get to communicate with. That's what prayer is. It's not just, you know, simply meditating or contemplating and connecting with the spiritual. It's communicating with God himself, the triune God who's in constant communication. We get to communicate with him, tell him our troubles, seek his wisdom.

And so that's what's, I think, the number one feedback we get is how that daily devotional helps them in their relationship with God. But then we get tons of feedback on how this content is really impacting their lives.

I'll give you this one story. It ties back to that last segment of content I talked about, the leader segment, the leader content. On Sunday Service, this story is an amazing story. It's very touching.

We got a call from our pastor, Pastor Adam Mesa, who did a Sunday Service. He said, "I wanna let you know something. I got an email from a law enforcement officer this weekend. This law enforcement officer listened to my message on Sunday Service, and he was so inspired by it. It moved him so much. He wrote me an email, and this is what he said: 'Pastor Adam Mesa, your message changed my life. I've been going through a lot of struggles. This weekend, I was about to commit suicide, but then I got a push notification on my phone from PRAY.COM, and it was your message. And I clicked that message, and I was listening to that message, and it saved my life.'" And he wrote Adam Mesa that email, and Adam shared it with us.

That's amazing. Faith works. Love works. It changes lives. It saves lives. And we're able to connect these amazing leaders with people of faith, people who are curious, not even necessarily people of faith. I wasn't a person of faith, but I was open. I was curious. And it was through faith that I found transformation, that I found inner healing, to help me through some of the struggles and trauma that I have faced growing up.

Dr. Lauren: Yeah. Absolutely. So, you've alluded a lot to how prayer can help with anxiety, depression, mental health issues, but connect the dots for us. What is it about prayer that tends to affect that for so many people?

Ryan: Yeah. So, going back to that book that I've talked to you about, The Awakened Brain, whether you agree with the spirituality of Dr. Lisa Miller or not, I think there's a lot that we can take from it as Christians.

And what she talks about is, she talks about spirituality as the relationship with the spiritual as opposed to religion, which is just a—it's more about your participation in a community of faith.

And I think as Christians, we talk a lot about this. Christianity is not a religion. It's a relationship. Right? We say that a lot. And so she talks about spirituality as this relationship, this personal relationship, and what they found is that those people who have formed their own spirituality, this relationship with the spiritual, have up to a 90 percent—they've formulated a mechanism by which they can protect themselves against anxiety, stress, and depression by up to 90 percent as opposed to those people who do not participate in spiritual practices.

This is—I mean, that's amazing. So that's why I think what we do as Christians, prayer is a weapon, is a weapon that we can utilize, a tool that we can utilize to fight back the anxiety and the depression. But it's something that we have to formulate through a relationship with God.

Dr. Lauren: Yep. Yep. Absolutely. And so as a naturopathic doctor, when I see mental, emotional health issues, I always kinda go through in my mind, there's a spectrum of possibilities. There could be a neurotransmitter imbalance. There could be a hormone imbalance. There could be a problem in your circumstances, or there could be a problem in your thinking. And sometimes it's not—it's not always just one. It could be a combo.

Because so many people will come in and think it's just neurotransmitter imbalance. And there is a chicken or egg aspect to that. Like, as you start to get bad ideas, you're eventually gonna have your neurotransmitters follow that, and it becomes a habit, but you can also reverse it in the other way.

And not only is so much of it possibly the way you're thinking or maybe the circumstances, and God can lead you to get out of that, maybe he can also lead you if there's a problem in the physical end. He promises to give us wisdom too to figure out where exactly are. Either give us the information we need or lead us to the people that we need in order to help us come through that.

Ryan: Yeah. So, absolutely, I love that. I love that.

Dr. Lauren: What have I not asked you that you wanna make sure that you leave with our audience?

Ryan: You know, I think that you've asked a lot of great questions, and I would say that—

Dr. Lauren: You could say there is seven. It's alright.

Ryan: I will say, you know what? That I think you've asked a lot of great questions around this topic. Actually, you know what? Here's one question. What does the future hold for PRAY.COM and mental wellness?

Dr. Lauren: Alright.

Ryan: Well, there's some actually cool things that we're doing. We—I'm not gonna announce the name, but we're in talks with and we're getting close to a deal with someone that I think will be really, really fun for the audience and really helpful for the audience to engage with on mental health. And so it's a celebrity person. A lot of people—everyone know who this person is. So stay tuned.

And then we're also working with some universities. We're working with Biola, Harvard, and Hope College, to do clinical trials and research on the effects of the Pray app on mental health. And so we're super excited about this, what we're gonna find there, and how we can actually utilize the Pray app to help people clinically.

And that's not to dismiss, you know, all the amazing benefits that psychology and psychiatry has given us. And so, you know, hopefully, PRAY.COM will be utilized as another tool in the toolkit to help people overcome some of these mental health challenges that we face.

Dr. Lauren: Yeah. Yeah. Fantastic. I love it. That's super super exciting. So where can people go to learn more about you and about the PRAY.COM app? I assume PRAY.COM, but if there's anything more specific.

Ryan: Yeah. You can go to PRAY.COM/meet-the-founders. That is a page where you can read about all the founder stories and how we started and how PRAY.COM started.

Dr. Lauren: Fantastic. Well, I will link to that in the show notes, and thank you so much, Ryan. This has been fantastic, and I'm so inspired by what you're doing.

Ryan: Well, thank you, Dr. Lauren. I appreciate everything that you do.

Dr. Lauren: Are you looking for a holistically minded health care practitioner who truly treats root cause rather than symptom suppression? Unfortunately, even in the alternative healing professions, this isn't a given. That's why I've created WholeHealthDoctor.com, a resource to help connect patients to health care practitioners in their area who share a root cause philosophy. Alternatively, most of the practitioners listed also practice telehealth. So if there isn't anyone local to you, you can still find a great practitioner to help you regain optimal health. Go to WholeHealthDoctor.com. That's WholeHealthDR.com. Type in your location or adjust the specialty that you're looking for and find the practitioner who's right for you.

Thanks for listening to Christian Natural Health. This show is run by you, so please write in with topic and guest suggestions for future shows. For more great content, subscribe to Dr. Lauren's blog at www.DrLaurenDeVille.com, or follow her on Facebook or Twitter at Dr. Lauren De Ville. If you enjoyed the show, don't forget to share it with your friends, and give us a 5-star rating in iTunes. It really helps us to stand out so other people can discover great content as well. Have a great week, and God bless you.

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