Kerygma · For Bible study groups

Bible study group trivia, anchored in your passage.

Custom-mode rounds built around the exact text your group is working through. Type the reference, set the difficulty, and run a fifteen-question warm-up that puts everyone on the same page — quite literally.

Why ordinary trivia falls flat in Bible study

Most Bible quiz games are random, surface-level, and disconnected from whatever your group is actually studying that night. They're fine as warm-ups for general Bible literacy, but when your group is six weeks deep in Romans or working through Isaiah, generic trivia feels like a tangent.

How Custom mode changes that

Open Custom mode. Type the passage your group is studying — say, "Romans 8" or "Isaiah 53" or "Hebrews 11." Optionally add the theme of your study (Custom mode used to be called Sermon mode, and it works the same way). Pick the difficulty and the question count.

The app generates fresh AI-written questions rooted in those specific verses. Run them as a Multiplayer round at the start of your meeting. Everyone joins the room from their own phone; the room code is five characters; each member sees the same question on their screen at the same time. Right answers open the actual passage with a one-paragraph commentary that ties the question back.

What you get is a five-minute exercise that demonstrates how carefully (or how loosely) the group has read the passage — and surfaces the moments worth talking about.

Suggested formats

• Pre-study warm-up — five questions on the chapter from last week. Quick recall, then move into the new chapter.
• Mid-session check — ten questions on the chapter you've just read together, before discussion. Highlights what people noticed and what they missed.
• Series review — at the end of a long study (Romans, the Gospels, the prophets), a twenty-question Profound round on the matching category. Often becomes its own discussion night.
• Topic survey — when your group does a topical study (prayer, marriage, suffering), use Custom mode with the relevant passages typed in.

Categories that pair well with Custom mode

Even with Custom mode as your primary tool, the standard categories are useful for general literacy nights or when your group rotates leaders:

• Paul's LettersThe Pauline corpus
• Old TestamentGenesis through Malachi
• New TestamentThe 27 books of the NT
• TheologyDoctrine and dogma
• ProphecyThe major and minor prophets
• Church HistoryTwo thousand years

Bible study games for small groups that don't feel like filler

Most Bible study games for small groups suffer from the same flaw — they're trivia for the sake of trivia, with no relationship to the passage your group is actually working through. A round of generic Bible Jeopardy at the start of a study on Hebrews is fine for energy, but it doesn't make the next forty-five minutes of Hebrews any sharper. What works better is using the game itself as the on-ramp into the text. Custom mode does this directly: you type "Hebrews 11" and the round becomes ten questions on Hebrews 11. The verse opening after each correct answer is the same passage your group is about to discuss. By the time you close the app, everyone has already read the chapter once — usually without realizing they did.

For groups studying a long arc — Genesis to Revelation, the Gospels in parallel, a year through Paul — rotate Custom mode rounds for the current passage with general-category rounds on adjacent material. Studying Romans? Run Custom on this week's chapter, then once a month run a Conversant Paul's Letters round to keep the broader Pauline context in view. Both formats are Bible study games for small groups in the legitimate sense — they generate engagement, but the substance under the engagement is the actual Word.

Bible quiz for church retreat — a forty-eight-hour format

A Bible quiz for church retreat works on different mechanics than a weekly study round. You're not trying to anchor a single passage; you're trying to thread a theme across multiple sessions over a weekend. The structure that holds up: pick a theme verse for the retreat (say, Isaiah 53 for a Lent retreat, or 1 Peter for a suffering-and-hope retreat), and run a short Custom mode round at the end of each teaching block. Friday night: five questions on the introductory passage. Saturday morning: ten questions on the deeper material the speaker covered. Saturday night: a fifteen-question Profound round on the whole arc. Sunday morning send-off: five Acquainted questions on the takeaway verse, projected from the leader's phone in pass-and-play mode while breakfast is served.

What makes this format work as a Bible quiz for church retreat rather than as five disconnected trivia rounds is the continuity of the underlying passage. By Sunday morning, every attendee has answered roughly thirty-five questions on the same text and has seen that text on the screen thirty-five times in three days. The leaderboard is for laughs; the verse repetition is for retention. Print the top-line passage on a card to hand out at the end, and the retreat becomes a study they actually carry home.