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This winter, hundreds of Episcopalians embarked on a walking pilgrimage around the Holy Land without ever having to set foot outside their neighborhoods—thanks to an app built by St. Martin’s-in-the-Fields Episcopal Church in Columbia, South Carolina.
The church’s smartphone app, which launched on November 29, allows users to trace a virtual 98-mile path through and around Jerusalem that follows the story of the Gospel of Luke. As with a fitness tracker, the app logs your mileage whenever you walk—wherever you are in the world–and the app’s map shows equivalent distances covered in the Holy Land, divided into six segments.