The Familheey App was in the news recently as Holy Cross Family Ministries, one of the Catholic Church’s respected family prayer ministries showcased it in their widely read newsletter A World At Prayer. The newsletter has a wide readership across North America, Latin America, Africa and the Asia Pacific. Here is the transcript of the PrayFest article:
HCFM’s PrayFest journey traces itself back to year 2020, the global year of resilience when the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted our lives. This time of adversity triggered the worldwide hunger for Catholic spirituality that manifested itself through an enhanced digital footprint for Holy Cross Family Ministries with significant assistance from PRAYFEST and FAMILHEEY.
Year 2020 saw a worldwide surge of public interest in prayer and spirituality on digital platforms. This trend aligns perfectly with our digital vision. The Familheey networking platform is seeking to engage with its growing prayer communities at 2 levels: Families and Youth (Gen Z born between years 2000 and 2020). The PrayFest community on the Familheey app complements our other social media channels, enhancing the vision and collaboration with impactful results.
Since December 2020, our International ministry centers have embarked on their own PrayFest initiatives to inspire, promote and foster the prayer life and spiritual well-being of families in 17 countries. The PrayFest community has set the goal of touching the lives of 1M+ people around the globe by promoting family and community prayer.
PrayFest and its community of 28 HCFM families exemplify Father Peyton’s message: ‘The family that prays together stays together’ and ‘A world at prayer is a world at peace.’
A NEW WAY TO PRAY
PrayFest on the Familheey app is a worldwide community dedicated to Catholic prayer that is for all families, communities and organizations during this challenging pandemic time. PrayFest unifies the spiritual efforts of 27 Holy Cross Family Ministry centers across 17 countries bringing their communities together to pray together across 5 continents.
Across the US, Latin America, Africa, Europe and Asia, we are bringing people onto the Familheey platform—as country borders disappear. Over this period, PrayFest has become the multi-lingual community catalyst encompassing diverse cultures.
Over a good week, you will see over 80 posts in different languages; English, Spanish, Tagalog, Bangla, Swahili, and Lusaka. And, that list is growing. Christmas, New Years and Easter took on a new community strength with PrayFest becoming an important platform with Catholic content that informs, involves and inspires Catholic family and community spirituality around the world. Familheey is now a powerful stage for prayer and spirituality.
A NEW IMPETUS FOR OUR MINISTRY
Our faithful PrayFest community is learning that there is a ‘new way to pray’: read the prayer, listen to the song, imbibe the teaching and respond with an ‘Amen’, the hands praying emoji or with your own comments. PrayFest offers you multimedia options to promote your ministry offerings. It could be a prayer meme (image), a prayer (pre-recorded audio), or even a hymn (pre-recorded video).
All that it takes is 5 minutes to start your own family (community) appointing members of your team as administrators to lead your groups. You can share multi-lingual content in multi-media formats like audio, video and images to share content with your communities. The greatest advantage you have is a Familheey Program Lead, who will help you to start your community with trainings for your ministry team to lead your family which is linked to PrayFest.
NEXT STEPS
PrayFest on the Familheey app inspire, promote and foster the prayer life and spiritual well-being of families around the world. If you or someone you know would like to receive this Quarterly Global Newsletter, please send your email address to Michelle Hassan at mhassan@hcfm.org and we will be happy to add them to our growing list of spirit-filled readers!