Built a Bible app — would love pastor feedback before I go further"
Hi all, I built a Bible app called Shade & Shelter, and I'd genuinely value feedback from people who actually pastor a church, since I don't. Not selling anything here, just trying to figure out if what I'm building is actually useful before I go much further. Here's what it does:
- Three translations — KJV, Berean Standard, and ASV — with a compare view that shows you word-for-word where two of them differ on a given verse
- A plain-language "ask a question" search that finds passages by meaning rather than exact words. The idea is that somebody with no internet at all can ask a question and get the verses you, the pastor, would point them to in a time of need. When the question is a heavy one — grief, addiction, abuse, wanting to hurt themselves — the app doesn't trust the search with it; it shows curated verses I chose deliberately, and hotline numbers where they're warranted
- A parallel Gospel reader — 60 events laid out in order with Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John stacked side by side, so you can see at a glance which accounts cover what and where they differ
- Cross-references and study notes on every verse
- Historical background for every chapter — who wrote it, when, and roughly when the events themselves happened
- A character index — pick a figure and see every verse they appear in, including under all their other names
And the part I've put the most work into, which is everything around marking up your own Bible:
- Highlighting and bookmarks. Five highlight colors, and you can name them — so yellow means "promises" and blue means "for Sunday," whatever system you already keep in the margins. Then you can filter your whole Bible down to just one color
- Notes on any verse, kept alongside the highlights and searchable
- Sermon notes — write the sermon, link every passage you're preaching from, and export the whole thing as a PDF
- Notes that find you. Open a chapter and the app will tell you which of your own sermon notes touch it. Fifteen years of preaching becomes something you can actually pull from instead of a folder you'd have to remember to go looking in
- Search across everything you've written, by keyword or by meaning — so "the one where I talked about the prodigal's brother" finds it even if you never wrote that word
- Export it all as a PDF. Just your highlights and notes, or a single book, or the entire Bible with every highlight and note printed inline where it belongs. Your marked-up Bible, on paper, that you actually own
Plus the usual — reading plans, a prayer journal, a verse of the day, and read-aloud audio for the whole Bible.
All of it works with no signal and no account. Everything lives on the phone, and it never sends anything anywhere.
Where I'm taking it next is the part I'm posting here about specifically, because it's built around a church rather than a reader.
The idea is that a church gets its own space in the app. You hand out a code — in the bulletin, in a text, from the pulpit — people enter it once, and from then on you can put things directly in their hands. The week's reading. The passage for Sunday. An announcement about the workday or the funeral or the potluck, arriving as a notification instead of an email nobody opens.
It wouldn't have to be the whole congregation every time. The youth group, the women's Bible study, the men's group, the deacons, a small group walking through something hard together — each can be its own space inside the church, with its own leader posting to it and its own study going, separate from whatever the congregation is on Sunday morning. So the woman leading the Tuesday study can run her own thing without needing to come through you every week, and nobody gets notified about a meeting they were never part of. Same for a church with more than one campus — each campus its own space under the same roof, with its own pastor posting to it.
You'd be able to hand off pieces of it, too. Somebody on staff or a trusted volunteer can post announcements and look after the day-to-day without having the keys to everything.
Then there's the Sunday side of it, which is the piece I'm most interested in hearing your reaction to. Two parts:
One is the verses on the screen. Right now those live for 10 or 30 seconds and then they're gone unless somebody's fast with their thumbs. If the same passage lands in everyone's app as you preach it, the screen keeps doing what it does, and people still have it Tuesday morning — in their own Bible, where they can highlight it and write on it. A complement to the screen more than a replacement, though I suspect it'd quietly take over some of the work.
The other is the sermon itself. You'd post the passages you preached from, and the congregation could walk back through Sunday on their own time, at their own pace, with the text right there and room to add their own notes underneath. Your notes could go with it too — either the whole outline attached to the sermon, or a single thought attached to a single verse, the way you'd write in a margin. Entirely up to you, one note at a time, nothing shared unless you choose to share it. The people who want to go deeper get to, and nobody who doesn't is bothered by it.
The whole thing stays one-way, on purpose. You post, the congregation reads. There's no group chat to moderate and no comment section to referee — I've watched enough church Facebook pages to know that's a job nobody signed up for.
And it won't be iPhone-only. It'll run on Android, and on Windows and Mac too, so the congregation isn't split by what phone they carry and you're not stuck writing a sermon on a screen the size of your hand.
So my question is really just: does any of that sound like something you'd use, and what am I missing? Is there something obvious I haven't thought of that would matter more than any of it?
No rush, and no wrong answer — "I wouldn't use this" is as useful to me as "I would." Happy to answer anything in the comments/replies rather than DMs, in case the discussion is useful to others in the group too.