Why we built BIBL for church groups (and why it's not a Bible app)
Six months into building BIBL, a small group leader in Birmingham messaged us: 'Your game is the first thing that's made my teenagers actually excited to talk about scripture outside of service.' That single message changed how we thought about what we were building.
The problem we kept hearing
When I started talking to church leaders about Bible engagement, I heard the same frustration over and over. Youth pastors, small group leaders, even elder committees: they all wanted to create moments where people genuinely connected with scripture, but everything available felt either too academic or too passive. A Bible-reading app sits in your pocket. A devotional is something you do alone. But gathering people around something competitive, something where you're actually testing your knowledge and having fun in the process? That was rare.
What surprised me was that these leaders weren't looking for study tools. They wanted a reason to bring people together. A conversation starter. Something that could run for twenty minutes between prayer and coffee, or become a recurring group activity. The specificity of that need shaped everything we decided to do with BIBL.
Building a trivia game, not a scripture tool
Early on, we made a deliberate choice that confused some people: BIBL is a competitive card game first. The questions are designed for play, for winning, for that moment when someone's jaw drops because they didn't know the answer. They're not designed for reflection or study. That distinction mattered to us, because we'd seen Bible apps try to be everything at once and end up being nothing very well.
Every question in the Genesis Pack (the free tier) is grounded in scripture and verified. No shortcuts. But the mechanics are purely about competition: Quick Match for solo rounds when you've got ten minutes, Daily Challenges to keep people coming back, and Pass and Play so a group can gather around one device and take turns. We launched with those free features specifically because we wanted church groups to try us with zero commitment. The barrier to a church leader downloading an app shouldn't be a subscription.
What happens when your group wants to go deeper
I watched what happened in the first month of real usage. Groups that started with Quick Match during a youth group meeting came back asking for more questions. So we built Leagues, which we added to the Basic tier, so a small group could track their standing against each other over weeks. Some leaders wanted live head-to-head play, not just local pass-and-play; that's the Lightning Duel feature in Pro, and it's been the single biggest driver of repeat usage we've seen.
The tier system (Free, Basic, Pro, Master) exists because we learned that different groups want different things. A youth group might start with the free Genesis Pack and never need more. A church that's built Bible trivia nights into their calendar might unlock the Kingdom Pack for ad-free Leagues play. A competitive group of adults might want the live Lightning Duel in Pro, or the Legacy Pack questions if they've genuinely mastered the earlier tiers. We built it so you could start free and stay free forever if that's what your group needs.
The conversation that happens after the game ends
Here's what I didn't predict: the messages from leaders saying 'A question came up about how many books are in the Bible, and now we're having this whole conversation about the canon.' Or 'Someone lost a Lightning Duel by one point and they're genuinely upset, which means they care, which means we're actually engaging with this material.' The game is the vehicle, but the real thing we've built is permission for people to be competitive about scripture in a fun setting.
One leader told us she used BIBL as an icebreaker for a new small group. Twenty minutes of Pass and Play, and suddenly people were laughing at each other's wrong answers, asking questions they'd never thought to ask before. That's the magic we're aiming for, and it's not something that happens with a Bible-reading app.
Why we're not a social network (and why that matters)
We're intentionally not building a chat feature or an async leaderboard or a social feed. I know that sounds like we're leaving something on the table, but we're not. BIBL works best when people are in the same room, or when they're in a live one-on-one duel. The moment you start designing for distant social comparison, the game changes. It becomes about vanity, about grinding, about watching other people's scores. That's not what church groups need.
Pass and Play is local multiplayer. Lightning Duel is live and one-on-one. You download BIBL because you want to play with the people in front of you, or you want a quick solo round during your lunch break. That clarity has made the product simpler and, I think, more useful for the groups we're building for.
Six months on, that message from Birmingham still sits in my inbox. If you're a church leader looking for a way to make scripture feel urgent and fun, worth trying. What would change in your group if people actually wanted to come early to talk about the Bible?