This year's projects.

Bible Game for Spiritually Open Students

We're looking for a Bible engagement experience that we can market to students via social media that attracts spiritually open people to engage with Biblical content. Our target audience is 18-24-year-old students in the UK.

Rather than build a standalone game we would prefer it be developed for an existing platform they already use and play on (Digital Nations research), ideally as downloadable content like a map or plugin, so it might be on Fortnite, Minecraft, Roblox, or similar. It doesn't even have to be a video game: you could choose to design a parlour-type game (along the lines of the ice bucket challenge) that is played out over social media such as TikTok, Snapchat or Instagram and is then supported by a website, for example. It needs to be a social experience, as journeying with the Bible is best done in community and conversations, journeying with your friends, reading Biblical content. So you might want to take inspiration from co-op social games such as Among Us and Big Walk.

Our hope is that these groups start to engage with reading the Bible, asking questions and eventually want to seek more formally, perhaps by attending an Alpha course or turning up to a local church service.

We're open to the sorts of Bible experience you might offer, but it might be something like the stories of Jesus (we can provide a list of passage references), interesting parables, angels and miracles or even the big story of the Bible. We're looking to trigger conversations around Bible stories among the spiritually curious. The Discovery Bible Study method is our default mode for this. For narrative ideas you could use historical contexts grounded in Bible stories, but equally you can use British Christianity, like the Vikings turning to Christ, Celtic practices on Holy Island or monasticism. You might want to think further out of the box: we've also seen Psalm 23 rendered as a garden at Chelsea Flower Show and the story of Jonah set in space (Pulsar). As Bible Society we'd likely be very interested in narrative concepts that tie in the contributions of Tyndale (his anniversary this year), William Wilberforce and the Clapham Sect, or indeed Bible Society's own history over the past 200 years.

Consultancy Helpline Agent

The simple answer would be some form of AI chatbot, but could we be more creative?

Stewardship wants to help Christians be the best stewards of the resources God gives us, and that includes helping churches and ministries steward their organisations well. For years, Stewardship has provided a consultancy helpline supporting ministries to think through charity law, governance, and the wider church and charity space. This weekend, we want to explore what could make all of this more accessible.

The project begins with a question: how can we help church and charity leaders become better leaders and stewards of the ministries they oversee? Over the weekend, this could take shape as an ideation and design sprint, or develop into an active prototype.

Map the Church's Social Impact

The Evangelical Alliance wants to explore building a nationwide database of church social action projects across the UK. The ambition is to give a clearer picture of the impact and difference that churches are making in their communities.

The results of this project will help policymakers understand the breadth and scale of what the church is doing, help church leaders see at a glance what social action is already happening in their area and where the gaps are, and let other organisations build on the data through the public API rather than duplicating efforts.

Over the course of the hackathon we're going from zero to one; we've got the idea and objectives, now we need to make it happen. We'll be:

• exploring how to structure and collect the data;
• building a mechanism to ensure the data stays up to date;
• producing a public API, so the data isn't locked away but can be used by other organisations working in this space;
• designing a frontend to map and display these community projects;
• thinking about how to raise awareness of church impact, such as communicating with MPs and local constituents.

By the end of the weekend, we want a working prototype that shows how this data could come together, and a clear plan for taking it further.

Prayer Flare

A PrayerFlare prototype was created at BUILD 2025. It enables Christians to find each other in and near their workplaces, meet, pray, and run outreach events together. This solves a problem many Christians face in finding fellowship with other believers outside their Sunday church setting. It contains many building blocks, including private invitations, workplace Places, Circles, small recurring Hearths, prayer rhythms, and check-ins, but these currently feel like separate features rather than one simple journey.

At BUILD 26, the team wants to turn the prototype into a viable product pilot. The goal is to build on existing infrastructure so that someone who receives an invitation can join the right workplace fellowship, find other Christians, and take part in a first shared group activity in under ten minutes. Rather than building new features, the focus is on turning existing capabilities into one easy-to-understand, end-to-end journey, from invitation and onboarding, through a coordinator setting up their fellowship, to a guided first prayer or rhythm together. The work must be done without touching authentication or privacy controls, so it can be safely tested with real users straight after the hackathon.

This is expected to become a live Transform Work product in 2027. The rollout starts with a technical alpha across 3 to 5 Cambridge fellowships this September and October, followed by BUILD 26, then a closed beta across around 40 Cambridge groups from November. Early 2027 will focus on beta improvement and scaling, before a broader launch at Spring Harvest at Easter, and full transition of existing Transform Work organisations to PrayerFlare by the end of 2027.

If you want to help Christians find each other, pray together, and transform their workplaces, join this team and help shape the journey that gets them there.

Product Strategy for an Uncertain AI Future

AI capabilities, and the way people adopt them, are changing faster than most product roadmaps. Stewardship helps Christians and the organisations they lead steward their resources well. For anyone building digital products, that now raises a hard question. How do you find product-market fit in an era of rapidly evolving AI capabilities and adoption, without relying on predictions about which technologies, vendors or futures will win?

At BUILD 26, Stewardship wants to develop an AI Navigation Framework, a practical way for product teams and organisations to find product-market fit, and keep it, whichever AI future arrives. The team will look at lessons from past technology shifts, explore where value moves when a technology disrupts a market, and examine AI future scenarios, not to pick a winner, but to work out how to track which story is playing out.

This project needs no code. Product managers, founders, designers, researchers and strategists will all find a place. The framework will directly shape Stewardship's AI strategy for years to come, and could do the same for other organisations too.

The Big Church Ethical Investment Tracker

Bank Well is inviting every church in the UK to make its money part of its mission, by switching to banking that invests for positive impact rather than in fossil fuels. The climate crisis hits the world's poorest first and hardest, and Bank Well sees switching banks as a practical way to love our global neighbours and to honour church giving as an act of worship, echoing Amos 5's call for justice alongside offerings. In the team's experience, most churches are keen once they've considered it, but many haven't thought about it yet, or are too stretched to take it on.

At BUILD 26, the team wants to build a tracker showing how much UK church money is already invested for positive impact, and how much more could be if churches switched. Seeing the scale, likely tens of billions of pounds, could be a powerful motivator. A previous team member has already written code that drafts results from Charity Commission data, but there were teething problems, not least working out which charities are churches, and many churches' financial information is scattered or hard to find. The weekend could involve scraping and data cleaning, with the aim of running rigorous quality assurance and ending the weekend with results Bank Well can publish on its website.

After the weekend, Bank Well will look after the tracker. The work at BUILD 26 will help shape what it becomes: a live tracker of the whole UK church's finances, a sample scaled up to a national estimate, or an analysis re-run each year as new accounts are filed.

VineMe

Life is better lived in community, but the easiest place to get lost is in a crowd. VineMe exists to help churches connect their congregations to small groups, where people can be known, needed and belong. Its name comes from John 15:5, 'I am the vine; you are the branches.' Small groups are where discipleship happens, yet VineMe's own research suggests only 30% of churchgoers in London are part of one. The app makes groups easier to find, makes requests visible to pastoral teams, and equips every church member to help others into community.

At BUILD last year, the team took VineMe from a pilot MVP to something ready for release, and version 2.0 went live shortly after the weekend. It now serves over 600 users at HTB Onslow Square, and the team has spoken with more than 30 churches keen to see where it goes next. That feedback has brought VineMe to a turning point, where acting on it will allow the app to be rolled out to many more churches.

At BUILD 26, the main aim is to begin rebuilding VineMe as a web app that churches can embed directly in their own websites, so congregations can start there rather than at an app store. Alongside this, there are a number of smaller improvements to the mobile app that will sharpen the experience for group leaders and pastoral staff. This is the first step towards VineMe 3.0, which will also bring a ChurchSuite integration, a protective admin layer and clearer analytics.

Frontend and backend developers, React Native developers and designers will all find plenty to get stuck into, as will anyone who loves the Church and wants to build something it will actually use. One developer who joined the team last year is still building with them, and recently invited the project lead to his wedding. Friendships grow here as well as software, and the team would love you to be part of it.