From Idea to App: How a Team of College Students Built a Bible Tool for a Generation Hungry for More

There's a moment in many young Christians' lives when familiarity with the Bible starts to feel different from actually understanding it. You know the stories. You know the answers. But the deeper you try to go, the more the distance between the ancient text and your own life seems to widen rather than close.

Jonathan Stanley felt that gap personally. And then he decided to build something to bridge it.

Jonathan is a student at Austin Christian University in Austin, Texas, and the founder of Veritas — an AI-powered Bible app designed to help people engage with Scripture not just as readers, but as genuine students of the text. The mission is straightforward but ambitious: help people understand God's Word with context, confidence, and clarity.

The app is live. The team is growing. And it all accelerated through one catalytic moment — the 2025 Gloo AI Hackathon.

A Problem Worth Solving

Jonathan has a phrase he keeps coming back to when he talks about why Veritas exists: “milk to meat.” It's a reference drawn from Paul's first letter to the Corinthians — the idea that spiritual maturity requires moving beyond surface-level faith into something richer and more substantive (1 Corinthians 3:1-3).

"We see a lot of people who haven't moved off milk onto richer, deeper substances," Jonathan says. "And as we were talking about theology and diving deeper into the Bible, we wanted to create a platform that merged new technology with artificial intelligence to help guide people in wrestling through the Bible for themselves."

The problem Veritas is designed to solve is the lack of tools to help people genuinely understand Scripture. As Jonathan describes, the Bible wasn't written directly to us, but was written to a different people, in a different time, and in a different language. That's not a reason to keep your distance from it, but it's a reason to build a better bridge of understanding.

"There's a bridge that needs to be crossed to understand the Bible most appropriately," he says. "And that's where a lot of people get lost. How do I approach it? How do I understand it? Where do I start?"

Built to Stay Out of the Way

What sets Veritas apart is how carefully the team thought about what the app should not do.

When you open Veritas, you open the Bible. Not a chatbot. Not a search engine. The text is front and center, and the AI tooling stays hidden until you need it. Select a verse or two, and a small inline editor appears — just enough to ask a question and get a grounded, context-rich answer. Close it, and you're right back in the text.

"The idea is not to get you separated from the Scripture," Jonathan explains. "Not to add another layer of distraction, but simplicity — keeping the word, the word."

That design philosophy reflects something deeper about what the team believes, that people don’t need handed-down conclusions, but tools to help them think critically about what they're reading. This helps people understand not just what the Bible says, but why it says it, who it was written to, and what the weight of a given passage actually means.

When questions touch on areas where Christians genuinely disagree — interpretive differences that have existed across church history — Veritas doesn't pick a side. It’s designed to lay out the evidence, surface relevant passages, and help the reader understand the landscape. The goal, Jonathan says, is never to tell people what to believe. It's to teach people how to think.

Building Together: The Team Behind the Idea

Building together was a core value to the Veritas project. Jonathan didn't build Veritas alone. When Austin Christian University hosted its own internal pitch competition ahead of the Gloo AI Hackathon, Jonathan brought together a team of peers whose strengths complemented the vision in exactly the right ways.

Sebastian brought deep theological muscle — a sharp, Scripture-first thinker who loves wrestling with the word. Walker brought a commitment to excellence that Jonathan describes as one of the most dependable qualities in a teammate. And Kassidy brought creative instinct and a heart for reaching people across cultures and nations.

Together, they built an app and created a pitch video that became one of the most memorable moments of the Hackathon. It opened with a timeline stretching from Gutenberg's printing press to the present day, and argued that powerful technology has always played a role in spreading God's word—making AI simply the next chapter in that story.

"We see this as another point in time where these really advanced tools are going to be able to unlock Scripture for people like never before," Jonathan says.

That video went through eighteen rounds of revision. The team worked up to the final hour before submission.

Winning — and What It Meant

When Veritas took home the grand prize at the 2025 Gloo AI Hackathon, it wasn't something Jonathan had been counting on. His mindset heading in wasn't about winning, but was about stewardship — showing up, building well, and trusting the outcome to God.

"We're not called to outcomes. God is the God of outcomes," he says. "What we're called to is stewardship. Take every day and make the most of it."

But when the announcement came, the room was electric.

"It was the culmination of the lead-up to all of this — how the Lord was orchestrating, how He was growing and maturing each one of us as a team," Jonathan says. "No one person can do that. That is a team."

The Hackathon gave Veritas more than a trophy. It gave the team a build period, a community, and the resources to take something from vision to reality. "Gloo's ability to help equip people to bring things from idea to reality — that was something they helped us do," Jonathan says. "Taking an idea and making it a reality is incredibly powerful."

What's Next

Veritas is now live at veritasbible.org, available on both web and iOS. The foundation is built. But Jonathan is clear that the app is just the beginning.

Two parallel tracks are shaping the road ahead. The first is experience — continuing to refine Veritas into a premium Bible reading environment that feels as polished and intuitive as the best apps in any category. The second is depth — building out the agent architecture to help users engage with increasingly complex theological questions, drawing on cross-references, commentaries, original language texts, and the rich body of biblical scholarship that already exists.

"What we really want to do," Jonathan says, "is inspire a community to come together to think about how this new technology can interact with the Bible — to help simply and thoughtfully communicate God's Word and help people wrestle through deeper, harder, meatier questions."

It's a vision that's still being built. But it's no longer just an idea.

Are You a Builder?

The 2026 Gloo AI Hackathon is open for registration. Every year, hundreds of builders — developers, designers, theologians, entrepreneurs, and dreamers — gather to bring ideas to life at the intersection of technology and human flourishing. Veritas started as one of those ideas.

Yours could be next.