Terms of service

Ardent Word is a project founded, developed and funded by Mawuli Dzaka under the Ardent Africa Foundation. In these terms, “we” means the Foundation and “you” means the person using the app or this website.

By creating an account or using Ardent Word you accept these terms. If you do not accept them, please do not use it.

It is a Bible reading app with a study companion, a private journal, and a community for prayer. It is free, and it is intended to stay free.

It is not

1. 1A crisis service, a counselling service or an emergency service. Nobody watches the community as it happens and we cannot send help to anyone.
2. 2A substitute for a doctor, a lawyer, a financial adviser or a qualified counsellor.
3. 3A church, or a replacement for one.
4. 4A source of medical, legal or financial advice, whether from Emmaus or from another member.

If you or someone else is in danger right now, contact your local emergency services. Get help in the app lists verified services for your country and works without a connection.

You must be at least thirteen, and at least the minimum age set by the law of your country where that is higher. We ask for your year of birth when you sign up.

If you are between thirteen and eighteen, some settings start in a safer position. You can see which on the community standards page.

Keep your sign-in secure and do not let someone else use your account. Be honest about who you are: you do not have to use your full legal name or show your face, but you must be a real person being honestly themselves. Do not run more than one account to get around a block, a suspension or our standards.

You can delete your account at any time, from the app or from this website without the app installed.

Everything you post publicly or to a group is governed by the community standards, which form part of these terms. In summary, and without limiting them: do not harass, threaten or demean anyone; do not post sexual content; do not ask members for money or promote anything; do not impersonate anyone; do not post another person’s private details; and never post anything that puts a child at risk.

Do not attack the service itself: no scraping, no automated access beyond what the app does, no attempts to break the security of the system or to reach another person’s data, and no reverse engineering of the parts that protect other people.

You keep every right you have in what you write. You do not sign your journal, your notes or your prayers over to us.

So that the app can work, you give us a narrow permission: to store your content, to transmit it, to show it to the people you chose to show it to, and to process it through the service providers named in the privacy policy. That permission covers nothing else. It does not let us publish your content, use it in marketing, or train a model on it, and it ends for any item when you delete it.

The Bible translations in the app are used under the licences and dedications set out on the licences page. You may read, copy and share scripture from the app for personal, devotional and teaching use. You may not extract a translation in bulk, build a database or a product from it, or republish it as your own.

Scripture is displayed exactly as the translators set it. Ardent Word does not paraphrase it anywhere, including in notifications, shared images and on this website.

Emmaus composes its answers with a language model. Every verse it shows is read from the copy of the Bible on your device rather than written by the model, which is a structural property of the system rather than a promise about its behaviour.

Everything else it says is its best effort and can be wrong. Do not treat it as authoritative, as pastoral counsel, or as a substitute for your own reading and for people who know you. Where a question needs a doctor, a lawyer or a counsellor, it will say so, and you should believe it.

Donations are voluntary and they buy nothing. They do not unlock a feature, remove an advertisement, raise a limit or change your account, because there are no locked features, no advertisements and no limits.

1. 1A gift is made to Ardent Africa Foundation and funds the running of Ardent Word.
2. 2You will receive a receipt by email for every gift.
3. 3A recurring gift can be changed or cancelled at any time from the link in your receipt, with no explanation required.
4. 4If a gift was made in error, or you did not intend it, write to support and we will refund it. We would rather return money than keep money somebody did not mean to give.
5. 5Payment details are handled by our payment processor. We never see or store your full card number or your mobile money PIN.

Shared content is checked before it appears. Where a standard is broken we may hold, edit or remove content, or suspend or close an account. We tell you what happened, in plain words, and you can appeal. The appeal is read wherever possible by a different moderator from the one who made the first decision.

Content involving children is handled differently: it is removed, the evidence is preserved, the matter is reported to the appropriate authorities, and it is never restored.

We will try to keep Ardent Word running and will tell you about planned interruptions, but we do not promise that it will always be available. Reading, your notes, your plans, your journal and the help card are designed to work with no connection at all, which is the strongest guarantee we can actually give.

We may change or withdraw features. Where a change is material we will say so in the app. If we ever had to end the service, we would give notice and time to export your content.

You can stop using Ardent Word and delete your account at any time. We may suspend or close an account that seriously or repeatedly breaks these terms.

Ardent Word is provided free and as it is. To the extent the law allows, we do not give warranties about it, and we are not liable for loss that we could not reasonably have foreseen, for loss arising from your reliance on Emmaus or on another member, or for anything done by another person using the community.

Nothing here limits our liability for death or personal injury caused by our negligence, for fraud, or for anything else that cannot lawfully be limited. Where you have rights as a consumer under the law of your country, these terms do not take them away.

The governing law and the courts that may hear a dispute are stated in the final version of these terms after legal review. Before any of that, please write to us through support. A person reads every message, and most things are resolved there.