Mobible

Connecting you to your faith

What is the problem?

Maintaining religious practice in a busy and increasingly digital life poses challenges for people who may struggle to see the value in attending a more traditional church ceremony or adhering to the church’s existing cultures. However, they still keep their faith and want to live by it. People may also find that translating religious teachings into practical guidance for life can be demanding. The pace of change in society poses regular challenges to the church’s position, forcing them to adjust and adapt their interpretations of scripture to keep harmony between moral teachings and modern life

How Mobible responds

Mobible decodes scripture and uses that as the foundation for a chatbot that can be tailored by your church’s teachings. Each congregant can have conversational guidance whenever they want, which can guide them through their thoughts on anything that’s on their mind.

Ask the Bible:
People can ask the Holy Bible whatever they need and be supported through their difficult situations. Mobible has decoded the scriptures with expert support from religious leaders so each person can enter into conversation with their religion. They can follow their denomination or their specific group.

Pray together:
Mobible supports people through their prayer sessions either individually or as collectives. It shows people their stats about how much they have prayed and helps them recognise patterns and form new rituals.

Connect your leaders:
Mobible connects people with their leaders so they are easier to book time with to speak to for advice or confession, and it allows them to pass on their teachings through the app if people have missed a service or simply so that faith can be more present in their everyday life rather than just once a week.

Donation management:
Through the app, people can donate to their community, the wider church or any other causes they wish to through the Donation Management system that connects to people’s accounts. People can pay single amounts, pay by round-up on all their small transactions or by direct debit.

Connect to your community:
Using the community page, people can post a message to everyone from their church who is in the area, whether they need a hand with something or just have something to say about the last service together. This can also expand out to connect with people from other churches or other faiths.

Learn about other religions:
In any interactions with the Mobible chatbot, users can also cross-reference teachings from other denominations and other religions to see how they would respond to the same issues. In doing so, people can see the similarities and differences in an attempt to promote tolerance.

Find out how we did a ‘backcasting of the value propositions’.

What we
learnt

We demonstrated a low fidelity prototype of Mobibleto high-need users and this is what we learned:

We found that people saw many opportunities for their church to capitalise on modern formats of interaction to expand what the church could offer, break down boundaries and create more free, open spaces for conversation.
While there was concern about the authority or authorship of the service, it posed exciting new ways to explore their relationship to faith.

Emerging topics from this proposition are around:

the way that congregations are connected or disconnected how the proposition poses challenges to the unusual dynamics of agency within faith experiences.

Underlying this concept is a proposal that can bring together, under one platform, different faiths or at least denominations of faith.Theoretically, using Machine Learning and AI the bible and scripture could be decoded and analysed to serve as the foundation for church knowledge and guidance. Because different churches interpret the scripture differently, there would need to be customisations to how the service represents each church’s teachings. t In this way, it divides the teachings into different arrangements of interpretation, but the common platform of the service would allow people to see windows into other interpretations.

This could mean that as you move through your faith experience, gradually learning about your church’s teaching and other church’s teaching ,you may shift and move and find other teaching’s more in line with your own values. In doing so, you may consequently have more freedom to follow those principles instead. In which case, would you leave your physical church and community entirely? Or do those elements serve a different purpose? How might this freedom to move between churches with different interpretations influence people’s relationship with the church and its role in people’s lives or influence the significance of the specific nature of people’s beliefs?

Church community

Many of those we spoke with talked about the importance of the church ‘family’, which brings them immense security, a place where everyone knows you well and can support you. But even those who talk fondly about this community, convey issues with expressing their views or talking about taboo topics because there is also a status associated with the purity of someone’s ethics and sophistication of their religious knowledge. They felt that this climate prevents dialogue and that potentially having other domains for conversation could help make the community more honest and connected. They also described how the other ‘community tools’ in the proposition could help bring people together to support each other whether they are of the same faith or not. But the fact they have faith in some way may bring them a sense of security and commonality, which could promote religious tolerance.

Power

This service brings religious authority into people’s lives in a more integrated way and would claim to give more specific guidance to people’s circumstances. Some of our participants felt very strongly that this could lead to too much power in the hands of too few people, particularly with a potential escalation in the amount of data collected about people and the increased capacity for manipulating people based on that data. However, they also felt that the ability to see other examples of religious leadership may mean that people feel less obligated to their leaders. Overall, they felt that even though people may have more freedom, discussing ethics with an algorithmic interpretation of your faith with specific connection to your issues could give religious teachings more authority than they should have.

Exchanging agency

Some participants argued that part of what is important about being religious is relinquishing some of their agency and control in their life in submission to god. They described this as an exchange whereby reducing their agency relieves their dependency on externalities in their life that they can’t control. That choice to be less in control puts control in God, but ostensibly in the hands of the church and could therefore potentially be corrupted like many other organisations. If Mobible had enough authority, it could encourage the surrendering of even more agency. Would this make people happier? Could the closer integration of faith in people’s lives help them adopt teachings into everyday life and therefore become more independent of the church?

Another perspective in this discussion is that some people described faith as being about a relationship with God, which requires an ongoing self-discovery and a constant search for understanding about themselves and their place in God’s world. This portrays the ‘exchange of agency’ in a much more balanced light that empowers the follower. Within this alternative perspective, would Mobible help people understand themselves? Or does it corrupt the nature of people’s relationship with God and treat decisions as transactions of knowledge rather than self-reflection.

Our new direction of exploration

If this proposition is taken further, the strategic question of relevance to our investigations is more along the lines of:

How can faith platforms be created in a manner that would promote religious tolerance, support communities and create empowering dynamics without fostering disproportionate power imbalances or distorting people’s relationship with God?

Related to ‘Mobible’

Scenarios

Religious malleability

Religious structures could feel unstable in their ethical foundations as they shift in reaction to threats from the World. It may be difficult to find a community to put your faith into because it could become difficult to distinguish between religious practice and an organisational/commercial service.

Dimensions of change

Spirituality

Values and beliefs could be strained by a mixture of people’s environment and self-discovery.

Proposition Types

Ethics Providers

Platforms as facilitators and brokers of value judgements. It’s possible that in the future we could foresee an advancement of AI with the ability to codify and model the highly complex ethical parameters of everyday life.

Would you like to know more?

Let's find the place to think, the freedom to challenge and the capability to act on real change. Together.

Mobible

Connecting you to your faith

How the scenario could unfold

In the future, we may see an increase in division among society as populism and online bubbles foster more extreme or inflexible standpoints, shifting the focus to differences and blame, rather than similarities between people. This division may be aggravated by churches or it may be seen as an objective for them to help heal communities.

At the same time, there may be increasing pressure on religious institutions to denounce teachings that are incompatible with modern culture. Such as traditional religious perspectives on the morality of gender equality or LGBTQIA+ rights. Modernisation may cause followers to question their faith or church or it may help win people’s approval.

The styling of religious experiences may go further. In recent decades, tens of millions of Roman Catholic Latin Americans have embraced Pentecostal Protestantism, in part because of its ability to adapt to the culture. For instance, it has successfully absorbed Latin American culture and music far better than Catholicism has in four centuries. Moreover, Pentecostal Protestantism focuses on faith healing, which drives many people to the religion in times of ill-health. These examples demonstrate how the malleability of religious institutions helps them survive.

We can also consider a continuation in the trend of ‘mega-churches’, which adopt commercial business models and tactics to spread their message further. So, we find a potential scenario where religions are more needed than ever for stability and social cohesion, but are faced with decisions about staying firm or adapting, styling and competing in a modern and dynamic world.

Find out how we ‘Learned from extreme users’.

What might that mean for Jean?

For someone like Jean, whose life is valued based on its alignment to his religious values and beliefs, threats to the church represent threats to him. We explore how services may evolve around these needs to support him or bring even more complications

Jesus is the source of happiness. I don’t worry about the future because it’s up to Him what will happen.

Jean is a cleaner. He wakes up early in the morning to travel all over south London for work. When he finishes his day, he picks up his kids from school and spends the ride home asking them about what they learned. On the weekends, he takes the kids to the park to spend quality time with nature, away from technology. On Sundays, he brings his family to the church where he finds acceptance and belonging in shared values. He had to change churches recently because he felt it’s teachings were being diluted.

For people like Jean, their happiness rests in an exchange with God. As long as they love and fear God, the world will respond accordingly. ‘As long as you fear God, you are ok’. Entwined with this, there are responsibilities to keep the local community strong, be thankful for what they have, and avoid short term temptations.

His goal

For Jean it is critical to stay connected to God, living in line with the teachings of the church and to provide for others in the community. Providing helps his status amongst the congregation, and helps him feel a part of the community

For people like Jean their concern is that the world is threatening their belief structures and challenging their core values. Some churches are adapting, but what does that say about their values and their spirituality?

Explorations in ‘Religious malleability’

We explore the future in this scenario by looking for potential points of friction between this context of religious malleability and the needs of someone like Jean. These explorations are outlines of services that act as emerging spaces for solutions or as spaces to explore the problems and provocations elicited by the services.

Pocket Jesus is an application that codifies the Christian faith and quantifies your religious practice. By codifying Christian practice and rules, it can correlate your practice with your life and happiness to bring your values more in line with your life. The service links teachings to the nature and subject of your prayer as well as offering new ways for you to donate and for church leaders to manage congregations.

Team: The Lab

Find out how we ‘Conducted lab explorations’.

VR Religious experiences

On VR Religious Experiences, you can subscribe to the channel that partly funds your church. The best VR religious experiences are here: You can have access to multiple channels divided by religion and hundreds of denominations. You can access experiences you could never have done otherwise, bringing you closer to your community, your faith and your God.

Team: The Lab

APPostle is an app powered by machine learning that is trained to track your activity and to stop you if you are doing something against your religion. It can codify your beliefs, monitor your alignment with and visualise your spirituality profile. The app makes suggestions and corrections to bad behaviours and actions against your religion.

Team: The Lab

Emerging topics

In this set of explorations we are asked to consider a course of events where faith organisations may use technologies that become the norm in other areas of life to entwine with people’s lives in deeper ways. This could be seen as a protective response by faith groups to protect their value and connection to people’s lives.

It may equally be plausible that faiths adopt new, less dominant positionalities in people’s lives. If we consider in this scenario that faith groups may reach further into people’s lives to protect their role in a world of dynamic modernisation, we can interpret this response as a way to understand people’s lives and move forward with them, constantly staying present, relevant and in tune with shifting wants, desires and values. Or, alternatively we can see it as a way to protect a more robust religious stance by controlling perspectives.

In either scenario, people become more vulnerable to manipulation. If a person’s ethics and values are structured by an institution, then it already has vast power. But, if it can monitor and influence daily actions then people become even more controllable.

t is also plausible that for some people this closer connection to their faith will bring far greater happiness. By knowing and understanding the teachings better and being able to more consistently connect their behaviours with their ethics and values, they may feel more spiritually fulfilled, socially connected to their community and, depending on the teachings of the faith, it may also bring greater social cohesion.

These explorations in future faith practice represent important questions about power, about the potential of strong leadership to connect or divide society, and about how integrating external faith voices into daily life could make people feel challenged or supported and validated.