The Story of Bible Anvil
It began with a fistful of highlighters, and with a question that took years to answer properly: who does the work belong to?
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The pens
I set out to mark up my Bible.
Coloured pens, a ruler, and a fistful of highlighters. Every time the word salvation appeared, I wanted it underlined in red and highlighted in yellow — so that I could see it whole, every place it stood, from Genesis to Revelation, all at once, in front of me.
I opened at Genesis 1 and started.
If you have never attempted this, I can recommend it as a way of discovering how long the Bible really is. Genesis to Revelation — for one word. And that was one rule. I had dozens of them in my head.
The trade
Then I found software that could do it for me. You wrote the rule once, and it marked the word everywhere, instantly. I bought it with money I could not really spare, and I thought I had come home.
I put the pens away.
I spent years in there. Rule upon rule, layer upon layer, until the text on the screen finally looked the way it had always looked in my head.
The refusal
Then I asked to print it.
Not to sell. Not to publish. I wanted the thing I had made — my Bible, marked my way — bound, and on my desk, and in my hands. The answer was no. My work stayed on their machine. I wrote to them. I wrote again. The answer never changed.
I had bought the pens in the first place because I wanted a Bible I could hold. I traded them for speed. The speed was real. The years were real. And at the end of them I had no Bible — I had a licence.
The to-do list
So I went looking for a new home. App after app; none of them right.
In the end I cobbled one together out of parts. A Bible app for the text. Another for what the first one lacked, and so on. And — I am not proud of this — a to-do list.
A to-do list. For the Word of God!
I used it because it did the one thing no Bible app would do for me: it could tag a verse. And once a verse was tagged, I could ask it to show me every other verse I had tagged the same way. Every verse I had ever marked salvation, gathered in one place, in front of me, at once.
That is not a nicety. Scripture answers Scripture — and I needed somewhere to put the answers.
So I did it by hand. Find the verse in the Bible app. Copy it. Paste it into the to-do list. Tag it. Go back. Then do it again. And again.
I did that for years, because the alternative was to stop.
I did not realise it at the time, but I was already building Bible Anvil. I was just building it out of a to-do list, one verse at a time, with my own two hands.
The sermon
Then one Sunday I stood up to preach a sermon I had prepared in one of those apps. It was a good sermon. The software had mangled it. I preached from memory, in front of my congregation, with nothing in my hands.
And standing up there, I had a wishlist as long as my arm.
I wanted to build a sermon out of the Bible I had already marked up — the verses pulled straight from my own work, in the same place I had done the work, without copying a single line into a second app.
I wanted to rehearse it properly. Not read it over in silence — hear it. In my own voice. Sitting in my own chair, with the visuals turning alongside, exactly as my congregation would hear it on Sunday. Because a preacher never gets to hear his own sermon. He is too busy giving it.
And afterwards I wanted to keep it. A sermon is the best a man understood on the day he gave it. I wanted to be able to go back to it.
All of it in one place. One app.
But nothing came close.
The decision
And the thought finally arrived.
These apps are all businesses. They do not have my interests at heart. I will build my own.
What the refusal built
Every part of Bible Anvil can be traced back to something on that list. But one thing was settled before any of the rest, because it was the wound.
Mark up your Bible however you need it marked. Then, when you are ready, ask us to print it. Your markup on the page. Your margin notes where you wrote them. Your study notes as an appendix. A real Bible, beautifully bound in leather of your choice, in your hands, because it was always yours.
There is a hard part, and it belongs here rather than in the small print. A translation belongs to its publisher, and printing one is a permission we have to ask for, one translation at a time. The answer will not always be yes. So we do the asking, and we tell you where a translation stands before you begin, never after — and a no is a no for one translation, never for your Bible. Your marks are tied to the verses, not to one publisher’s wording. They travel.
I will not hand anyone else the letter I was sent.
The name
I called it an anvil because an anvil is the one tool in the forge that does nothing. It is struck; it does not swing. It takes the blow so that the metal can take the shape.
That is the whole of what I set out to make, and the whole of what I am claiming. Something hard enough to work on and patient enough to wait. It holds. It does not shape.
The anvil does not shape the iron. The hammer does.
— The Founder
Reserve your founding place.
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