Case study · Progressive web app
Pocket Apologetics: An Offline Handbook for Hard Questions About the Christian Faith
An installable, offline handbook of 80 Scripture-grounded answers to hard questions about the Christian faith, with a moderated forum and prayer wall.
- Client: My Business Magnet product
- Location: Jacksonville, FL
- Year: 2026
- Live site: pocket-apologetics.mybusinessmagnet.tech
- Built with: Next.js + React, TypeScript, Tailwind CSS, Supabase (Auth + Postgres), Service worker (PWA), Zod, Vitest + PGlite, Netlify
The Problem
Christians get hard questions from skeptics, from friends of other faiths, and from their own doubts, and the good answers are scattered across long books, lectures, and articles. None of that is something you can pull up in the middle of a conversation, often with no signal. Building an app around Scripture adds a licensing problem too: publishers cap free quotation of modern translations across the whole work, and a few hundred answers plus a verse for every day of the year would pass those caps.
What We Did
- Wrote the product spec first: mission, guiding principles, and one fixed template for every entry. Each entry has the question, the objection stated in its strongest form, a 30-second answer, Scripture, the evidence, a word study, follow-up objections, where Christians differ, and further reading.
- Stored content as Markdown with frontmatter, validated against a Zod schema on every build and compiled to static pages. An AI research pass checked quotes and citations online and logged every claim it could not confirm in a reviewer notes file. Every entry is labeled Draft until a theological reviewer signs it off.
- Solved Scripture licensing in the architecture. Content stores references only, never verse text. The public-domain BSB, KJV, and WEB are bundled per passage so they work offline. ESV and NIV are fetched on demand through a proxy that serves only passages the handbook itself uses, so it cannot be used to scrape a licensed translation.
- Made it a real installable app. A hand-written service worker precaches the app shell and Scripture bundles so the handbook and search work offline, and the install manifest adds home-screen shortcuts to Search and Saved.
- Built the community side on Supabase: forum boards that mirror the handbook collections, a prayer wall that is anonymous by default and visible only to signed-in members, moderator applications approved by an admin, a report queue, and self-service account deletion. Row-level security policies, grants, and triggers are covered by tests that run against an in-process Postgres.
- Shipped it search-ready and hardened: security headers on every response, a sitemap, canonicals, structured data, and link previews, with account, prayer, and moderation pages kept out of search. The old Netlify address 301-redirects to the mybusinessmagnet.tech subdomain.
Results
| Measure | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Handbook entries | n/a | 80 across 16 collections |
| Scripture passages bundled for offline reading | n/a | 851, in 3 translations |
| Hebrew and Greek word studies with Strong’s numbers | n/a | 102 |
| Daily verses scheduled | n/a | 366 |
| First commit to live | n/a | 4 days |
Outcome
Pocket Apologetics is an MBM product rather than client work. It went live on October 10, 2026, and its 80 entries are now in theological review before the Draft labels come off. The build shows what MBM brings to a content-heavy app: a spec before code, licensing and moderation solved in the design, and a site that works offline and is ready for search on day one.