Biblica has built around 230 Bible apps that reached about seven million people last year and drove roughly half a billion engagements with Scripture, without writing a single line of its own code. The lesson: God can use the tools you already have.
In this talk from CV's Global Digital Day in London, Joshua Seale, who leads digital products at Biblica and chairs the Missional AI Summit, focuses not on what's next in technology but on what's possible now.
Biblica is a 215-year-old Bible translation ministry that stewards about 100 translations in the world's most widely spoken languages. You may know its work through the NIV, the NVI in Spanish and Portuguese, or La Bible du Semeur in French, as well as contemporary translations in Arabic, Hindi, Chinese, Farsi and more. Its mission: the Bible for everyone, everywhere, to experience the life-changing gospel of Christ.
Digital Scripture engagement is concentrated in a handful of languages, leaving billions of speakers of major world languages underserved.
When Joshua joined Biblica in April 2020, it had strong partnerships with large Bible platforms like YouVersion and Bible Gateway. But the data revealed a gap. Of roughly 30 billion Scripture engagements on those platforms in a year, 95% happened in just five languages: English, Spanish, Portuguese, German and French. Biblica's other 95 translations, including Hindi, Chinese and Arabic, spoken by billions, made up less than 4.5%.
Even where engagement is strongest, the share of Christians using these platforms is small: under 4% in the US and under 2% in the UK. In much of the world, it's far lower, about half of one percent in Egypt and a third of one percent in Ethiopia.
A $2,000 experiment showed that digital Scripture could reach people at a fraction of the cost of print, and it was ready when a crisis hit.
In 2022, Joshua proposed a deliberately tiny test: about $2,000 to build six apps and see what they could learn in a month. The team used Scripture App Builder, an open-source platform built by an SIL missionary and used to create around 3,500 apps. Joshua, who isn't a developer, built the first Arabic app in about an hour.
The results were striking. Getting a printed Bible into Iraq costs around $12 once printing, shipping and import are included. A digital Bible could get into the country for about 17 cents. Biblica still believes in printed Bibles, but this changed how the team thought about reach. Leadership's response: keep going.
On February 23, 2022, Biblica received final sign-off on a Ukrainian New Testament five years in the making. The next day, Russia invaded Ukraine.
That morning, the team asked whether they could build an app to serve people going through trauma. Leadership said go for it. They built the app that day and had it live on both app stores within two days. Within 200 days, it had more than a million users, 95% of them inside Ukraine, at a time when getting anything into the country was extremely difficult. At times, hundreds of people were reading Scripture in the app at the same moment.
Innovation is often about combining existing tools in new ways, and it works best when teams live close to the problems they're solving.
Joshua has studied innovation at Oxford and Stanford, and a recurring theme is that innovation often means mixing existing things in new and novel ways, what writer Steven Johnson calls "the adjacent possible." It doesn't have to be a giant leap. So his question is simple: what could you do with what you already have?
He loves imagining what's possible, but he's "allergic" to innovation efforts that only chase bleeding-edge technology. Biblica's 20-person innovation team is intentionally embedded in the regions it serves, with members in Egypt, South Africa, Kenya and Cyprus, so they can solve real problems for real users.
By publishing resources under open licenses, Biblica has multiplied its reach through partners, and its AI chatbot stays narrow so it stays accurate.
Fewer than 5% of pastors worldwide have formal theological training, Joshua notes. Study Bibles help, but they're expensive. Biblica once planned to equip 1,000 pastors in Venezuela, but even at the publisher's best price of $30 per study Bible, the $30,000 project couldn't be funded.
So Biblica wrote its own study Bible. It took four years, and from the start the team decided to release it under an open license so anyone could use and share it. Biblica has also committed to making half its translations openly licensed under Creative Commons, available through Open Bible, so anyone can build with them.
The open approach is paying off. The Biblica Study Bible app launched in English in August 2024. Spanish followed and reached in three months the number of users English took about ten months to reach. It has since launched in Hindi, Arabic, Chinese, French, Portuguese, Swahili and Russian, all translated by partners rather than Biblica itself.
Biblica then built an AI chatbot for pastors in the emerging world. The original plan was WhatsApp, but Meta blocked it and later announced it would restrict third-party chatbots on the platform, so the team pivoted and built it into the study Bible app.
Two choices make it different. It connects directly to the Scripture text, so verse quotations are fully accurate, compared with the 50–70% accuracy Joshua sees from general models. And it's trained only on the Biblica Study Bible, keeping it narrowly focused. Launched in mid-October with little promotion, it had already answered around 20,000 questions. Versions in Hindi and Spanish are live, with more languages coming, because English isn't the end goal.
Innovation takes time and often fails before it succeeds, but a focused approach can reach people the big platforms miss.
Innovation isn't easy, Joshua admits. It took more than two years to see the first big win. Biblica's first app took months to build and drew about a hundred users, most of them Biblica employees. But the team kept building, learning and wrestling, and some of the projects once shelved in the archive folder later became the seeds of success.
His takeaway: persistence beats perfection. Showing up and trying things is massively underrated. And when you're sick of hearing yourself make the same case, that's often when the rest of the organization is finally starting to get it.
Compared with the major Bible platforms' roughly 120 million users, Biblica's seven million is small. But Biblica isn't trying to compete in the top languages, where its partners do excellent work. It focuses on the bottom of the list: languages with communities of 10 or 20 million people that may see only a thousand users in a year.
Over the past 12 months, across the 20 most underrepresented languages, Biblica reached 10,000% more users than the large platforms, by being clear about exactly who it's trying to reach.
Joshua's challenge: What can you do now, with your organization, partnerships and existing resources, to serve the kingdom? God can use the things you have right now.
Listen to the full talk on the Missional AI Podcast, and subscribe for more talks and conversations from CV's Global Digital Day.
The Missional AI 2026 Global Summit takes place April 7–9, 2026, in Silicon Valley, bringing together around 1,000 people. Missional AI is also planning regional gatherings, including London in July and likely Mexico City and Nairobi. Find out more at missional.ai.
This episode was made possible in partnership with CV.