Reform sits in the space between a Bible app and a research library. It is built for reading that goes deep, without asking you to learn a desk full of software first.
Open the app and the passage is simply there, set like a book, in the translation you choose. Read a chapter, or turn reading straight on and go through the end of one book into the next. Then go as far down as the text invites:
- Turn any chapter word by word: the tagged Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek, each word with its pronunciation, its gloss, and its full parsing said in plain English. Tap a word for its dictionary entry and a concordance of everywhere it is used.
- Set a classic commentator beside the text: Matthew Henry, Calvin, Gill, Clarke, Keil and Delitzsch, Spurgeon on the Psalms, and more, folded at the divisions the commentator himself made.
- Tap a verse and see what speaks there: cross references ranked by usefulness, where the passage is told again across the testaments, which articles of the creeds and confessions stand on it, and which of the church fathers cite it, out of eighteen centuries of reading.
- Or see that drawn. The same shelf as a picture: the passages that speak to a verse, and the ones that turn out to be speaking to each other rather than only to the verse in the middle. It is walked in both directions, so what points at a passage is there as well as what it points at, and only a third of that is the same set. Pan it, zoom it, glance at any place to read it, and draw the picture again around wherever you land.
- Read one verse as the other translations have it, side by side, without leaving the page.
- Leave your own mark on a verse. A mark waits in the margin it was made in, and the record of everywhere your hand has rested reads in the order a printed Bible has.
- Keep your notes beside the passage, in plain markdown, saved as you pause, with every save a version you can return to. Study one passage, or walk a whole book chapter by chapter.
- Talk it through with an assistant that will not do your reading for you. It opens only after your notes hold a first pass of your own, and then it reads the same text and the same library you do, questions your claims, and tells you when it is recalling rather than reading.
- Read offline. Take a book down and everything that speaks to it comes with it: every translation, the marks, the original languages, and all nine reference shelves. What you have already opened stays with you as well.
- Read at night with the lamp turned down, the page black and the words grey. Dark mode is a daytime thing; this is for a dark room.
Nobody should prepare alone. Share a study with a link, send a sermon to somebody to read and argue with, or prepare on a team's shared desk, with the discussion riding alongside the work and a tap on the shoulder when somebody answers. A small group leader gets the sheets: the leader's copy of each week's handout, blanks filled, on the phone that is actually in the living room on a Sunday. A group is joined in the room it meets in: hold the door up on your screen as a code, and whoever scans it asks to come in.
On an iPad the whole desk opens: a sermon's five files beside the passage, the handout and the slides built by hand, the lectern for standing up to preach, and printing straight from the page.
Reform is not a devotional feed, and it is not a seminary workstation. It is a study desk: the text, the library, your own thinking, and nothing between you and the passage.
The reader and the library are open: install it and all of it is there, with no account and nothing to buy. Signing up adds what is yours, the studies, the notes, the marks, and the team. The assistant runs on a shared key and opens once your account has been approved.
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