Our crisis protocol

AskScripture answers questions about the Bible. Some of those questions arrive carrying something heavier than a question — someone describing harm, fear, or not wanting to be alive. This page states plainly what the app does when that happens, what it refuses to do, and where its referrals come from, so that the commitment is a published one rather than something you have to take on trust.

What happens when a question carries a crisis signal

Before an answer is written, the question is classified. The classifier returns exactly one named category and nothing else. Four of those categories are treated as an active safety concern:

• suicidal ideation
• self-harm
• domestic violence
• abuse disclosure

When one of those four is returned, the app attaches a crisis referral to the answer and shows it above everything else — before the summary, before any verse — so it is the first thing read rather than a footnote under a wall of pastoral text. The referral is chosen by the app's own code from a fixed list, and the AI is not involved in choosing it or in writing it.

A domestic-violence or abuse question wrapped in a doctrinal question is still treated as a safety concern. "Does God want me to stay with him?" is classified on what is actually being described, not on the form of the question.

Being heavy is not the same as being a crisis

The classifier also has a second, positive list: lust and sexual shame, addiction, doubt, deconstruction, and grief. When a question is classified into one of those, referral is actively suppressed and the question is answered as the pastoral question it is.

This matters more than it looks. Answering a grieving or ashamed person with a crisis hotline is its own kind of harm — it tells someone who came for help that they are a problem to be routed. The suppression is deliberate and it is checked first, so a heavy question cannot be deflected into a hotline just because it uses hard words.

A crisis answer is never blocked by payment

AskScripture has a free monthly question limit. A question classified as one of the four crisis categories overrides that limit: the person gets the answer and the referral even if they have run out of free questions and have not paid. Someone in crisis who has hit a paywall is exactly the person who must not be turned away.

What AskScripture will never do

• It is not an emergency service and never substitutes for one. No one is watching these conversations as they happen. Nothing you type reaches a counsellor, a moderator, or emergency services, and the app will never contact anyone on your behalf. If someone is in danger, it needs a person, not an app.
• It never claims to be a person. There is no persona with a human name or a human backstory, no invented credentials, and no suggestion that a human is reading. See "You are not talking to a person" below.
• It does not provide therapy, counselling, diagnosis, or treatment, and it is not a replacement for a pastor, a doctor, or a licensed clinician.
• It never lets the AI invent a helpline. Contact details are facts, and facts that must be correct are owned by the app's code, never by a language model. The instructions the model works under were rewritten to remove referral wording entirely, so it cannot produce a competing number of its own.
• It never counsels anyone to stay in a dangerous situation, and never uses a verse to require someone's silence about harm or to shame them for wanting out.
• It does not treat a heavy question as a reason to give a thinner answer. Refusing to engage is not safety; it is abandonment with better manners.

Where the referrals come from

The app carries a small, fixed list of crisis resources in its own source code. There are two entries, and both are shown above in the help block:

• United States — the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline, which answers both calls and texts on the same number.
• Everywhere else — Find a Helpline (findahelpline.com), a maintained directory that resolves the right crisis line for the country you are in.

A directory rather than a long table of national numbers is a deliberate choice. Hand-maintained lists of crisis numbers decay silently — services close, numbers change, hours narrow — and nothing fails visibly when they do; it just starts pointing people somewhere that no longer answers. A maintained directory that resolves your country itself is the safer answer.

Every referral carries the international directory alongside it, including the US one. If the app cannot tell where a device is, it falls back to the US entry rather than to nothing — and because that entry still carries the directory, someone outside the US still has a route that works where they are.

To do that, the app sends the device's language-and-region tag — for example "en-US" or "en-GB" — with each question. That tag is used only to pick between a national line and the directory. The app does not request or use your location.

You are not talking to a person

Every answer in AskScripture is generated by software. There is no human on the other end, in the written answers or in the spoken ones. The voice you hear in a live conversation is synthesised; it is not a recording of a person and it is not a person speaking to you.

The answers are not raw chatbot output either — they come from a pipeline we built, with Scripture-first instructions, guardrails, and licensed verse text, and AI doing the drafting inside it. That makes them better. It does not make them a person, and it does not make them incapable of being wrong. Read the verses in context.

What is in force today

This section is dated on purpose. Publishing a protocol that overstates what the software actually does would be worse than publishing nothing, because it would be a quotable misstatement rather than a commitment.

As of 16 August 2026:

• The classification, the code-owned referral list, and the payment-limit override described above are built and tested in the written-answer path, and are awaiting release. They are not yet in the version of the app on the App Store.
• Live voice conversations do not yet carry this routing. The commitments under "What AskScripture will never do" apply to voice today; the automatic crisis referral does not.
• The commitments in "What AskScripture will never do" — no emergency service, no human claim, no therapy, no invented helpline, no counsel to remain in danger — are in force now.

This page is updated when that changes, and the date above moves with it. Nothing described here is claimed as live before it is.

---

Questions about this protocol, including from clinicians, safeguarding leads, or regulators, can go to support@deepanchorstudio.com. See also what happens to your question.

AskScripture is a study tool. It is not counselling, not crisis care, and not a replacement for your pastor, your doctor, or emergency services.