GOCHURCH
Community Platform + Scripture-Grounded AI Agent
A multi-location church needs one home for everything — service times, places to visit, content to grow by, a way to give — and, increasingly, somewhere to ask honest questions. A generic chatbot is the wrong tool for that last part: it will happily invent a chapter and verse that does not exist. The hard, interesting problem here was building an assistant that is genuinely helpful and refuses to wander off-source.
Origin Story
GoChurch ('Stronger Together') spans Manchester, Bradford, Liverpool and Beirut. The community wanted a modern, welcoming platform — but the part I was most drawn to was the AI assistant, where accuracy is not a nicety but the entire point. An answer about scripture that is confidently wrong is worse than no answer at all.
How It's Built
The assistant is a domain-specific agent rather than a wrapper around a general model. It is grounded in theological texts — the King James Version — and the church's own blog content, and it is built to ground every answer in those sources rather than improvise. Retrieval first, generation second, with guardrails that keep it inside the corpus.
Engineering Notes
Retrieval before generation
The King James Version and the church's own blog content are embedded and indexed for vector search. Every question retrieves the relevant passages first; Gemini only ever generates over what was retrieved, which is what keeps answers anchored to real sources.
Guardrails against confident wrongness
A generic chatbot will happily invent a chapter and verse. GoChurch's agent is built to refuse off-source speculation and stay inside its corpus — because in this domain an answer that is confidently wrong is worse than no answer at all.
One home, four locations
Service information, content and giving span Manchester, Bradford, Liverpool and Beirut, modelled so the multi-site experience stays consistent as locations and schedules change.
GoChurch is a study in grounded AI for a domain where being wrong is unacceptable. The engineering lesson generalises far beyond a church: when the cost of a confident hallucination is high, retrieval and guardrails are not optional polish — they are the product.
What It Does
Scripture-Grounded Assistant
A custom agent that answers questions grounded in the KJV and the church's own writing, using retrieval to stay anchored to real sources rather than hallucinating chapter and verse.
Multi-Location
Find services and plan a visit across Manchester, Bradford, Liverpool and Beirut, with each location's information kept structured and current.
Discover & Grow
'Discover Jesus', leaders' blogs and reading plans give newcomers and regulars alike a clear path into the community's content.
Give Generously
An integrated giving portal makes donation simple and direct, woven into the same clean experience as the rest of the platform.
Where It Stands
GoChurch is live across four locations with the scripture-grounded assistant in the UI. The retrieval corpus is designed to grow — more blog content and locations slot in without touching the guardrails that keep answers on-source.
GoChurch is a Next.js and TypeScript application styled with Tailwind CSS, hosted on Firebase. Its centrepiece is a retrieval-augmented (RAG) agent: the King James Version and the church's blog content are embedded and indexed for vector search, and Gemini generates answers strictly over the retrieved passages. Guardrails keep responses inside the source corpus and discourage off-source speculation, so the assistant stays trustworthy on exactly the questions where trust matters most. Location, service and content data are modelled to keep the multi-site experience consistent.