Fellwork — deep Bible study, built for everyone

The thesis

Pastors and students in emerging markets are doing serious exegetical work on $200 phones over metered data. The existing stack — Logos, Accordance, BibleWorks — was designed for North American seminarians on broadband with disposable income.

A faithful, accountable, deeply-linked Bible study experience can run on a feature-class device, in any of 15 languages, without a subscription gating the original Greek and Hebrew. So we’re building it.

Built solo. No funding. Open by design.

The data foundation, already in place.

Curated, computed, and aligned data layered over the entire 66-book canon — by one founder.

Original‑language foundation

Hebrew & Greek lemmas: 15,110
Word-level alignments (Heb/Grk → English): 1,148,493
LXX (Septuagint) alignments: 325,482
Linguistic senses: 87,833
Sense definitions: 52,777
BHS critical-apparatus entries: 49,825
Masorah notes: 37,822
NETS Septuagint verses: 23,145

Commentary intelligence — 215 volumes ingested

Cross-references extracted: 444,717
Discourse-structure notes: 112,246
Word studies: 70,072
Documented commentator debates: 18,584
Pastoral applications: 14,294
Depth insights: 5,403
Pericope units: 4,507
Book outlines: 2,452

Theological & structural layer

Theological concepts: 41,152
Concept ↔ original-language alignments: 62,839
Word cards: 13,735
Phrased blocks: 8,317
Genre sections: 1,194
Messianic prophecies cross-referenced: 310
Literary structures: 18

Coverage: all 66 books of the canon. ~3M+ curated / derived data points. The faithful translation engine — the user-facing output, with deterministic phrasing and per-stem glosses — is being built on top of this foundation now.

Open infrastructure shipped along the way

Rust crate

magna

Auto-generates a GraphQL API from any Postgres schema. Field-level extension surface (Rust trait, YAML, HTTP webhook, WASM in v0.5). MIT / Apache, honest stability labels, written succession plan.

Permissively-licensed alternative to Postgraphile and Hasura. Powers Fellwork’s own /graph/graphql surface.

github.com/fellwork/magna →

TypeScript

scribe

@scribe/signals — ~1 KB gz reactive primitives. @scribe/arbor — small renderer. Sync semantics, lazy computed, explicit batch. No proxies, no scheduler queue, no global tick.

Built so the Fellwork reader can run smoothly on cheap Android phones in low-bandwidth markets. The whole reactive layer is smaller than a single React component bundle.

github.com/fellwork/scribe →

Who this serves

Pastors and seminarians in the global South who can’t justify Logos’s $400+ / yr pricing but need real exegetical tools.
Students learning biblical Hebrew and Greek in countries where seminary libraries are thin and digital resources are paywalled.
Bible translators working in under-resourced languages who need a faithful, transparent, every-word-traceable English reference.
Anyone on a $200 phone over metered data who has been told that “real” Bible study tools require a desktop.

Where targeted infrastructure investment unlocks the next leg

In-browser dev environments for international contributors. Translators and reviewers in 80+ countries can iterate on the faithful-translation engine without wrestling with Windows / Linux / macOS local setup. Cloud-hosted dev environments remove the single biggest onboarding blocker.
AI-assisted coding agents for the translation-tooling iteration loop. Fellwork’s deterministic language engine is rule-table driven — exactly the workload modern AI coding agents excel at scaling.
Hosted preview deploys for the public-facing scripture data. Cheap, fast preview URLs for every PR mean external scholars and reviewers can validate output before it ships.

Founder

Shane McGuirt

Navy veteran (Retired). ASU Tech Entrepreneurship & Management alum. Currently studying Biblical and Theological Studies at Regent University. Member of Alive Church, Chesapeake, VA. Building Fellwork full-time.

srmcguirt@gmail.com · github.com/fellwork