Adventist Study MCP

An MCP server for Seventh-day Adventist Bible study. It answers not just "what does this verse say?" but "why do Adventists believe this?" — connecting a topic to Scripture, to the church's official doctrinal statement, and to classic Adventist writings, with citations throughout.

Everything runs locally against a bundled SQLite database. No API keys, no network calls at query time.

What's included

Related MCP server: EGH Research

Setup

python3 -m venv .venv && ./.venv/bin/pip install -e ".[dev]"

Build the database (downloads sources once, ~15 MB, then works offline):

./.venv/bin/python scripts/build_all.py

Register with Claude Code

claude mcp add adventist-study -- /absolute/path/to/adventist-mcp/.venv/bin/adventist-mcp

Or add it to your MCP config manually:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "adventist-study": {
      "command": "/absolute/path/to/adventist-mcp/.venv/bin/adventist-mcp"
    }
  }
}

Tools

Topic matching

study_topic and beliefs_get accept colloquial phrasing, not just formal doctrine names. A curated topic index maps everyday questions to the right belief:

Anything not in the index falls back to stemmed full-text search over the belief statements.

Rebuilding

Each source can be re-ingested independently. Downloads are cached in data/raw/, so re-runs are offline.

./.venv/bin/python scripts/ingest_bible.py          # all four translations
./.venv/bin/python scripts/ingest_bible.py kjv asv  # or a subset
./.venv/bin/python scripts/ingest_beliefs.py
./.venv/bin/python scripts/ingest_egw.py GC DA

data/adventist.db is a build artifact and is gitignored.

Tests

./.venv/bin/python -m pytest tests/ -q

Remote transport

The server speaks stdio by default. --transport streamable-http serves it over HTTP, which is what non-local clients need. This path is wired but untested against any specific remote client.

Sources and licensing

All bundled content is public domain or an official church publication:

• Bible translations from scrollmapper/bible_databases — KJV (1769), ASV (1901), YLT (1898), BBE (1949).

• The 28 Fundamental Beliefs from the official General Conference statement, as published by the Southern Zambia Union Conference.

• Ellen G. White writings from the official Ellen G. White Estate PDF editions — all first published before 1929 and in the public domain. Page numbers in citations are the original printed pages, so GC 574 refers to the same text a print edition does.

The EGW corpus here is a small public-domain subset. The complete corpus is available through the official EGW Writings API, which requires registering an application and OAuth — a possible future addition.

Not yet included

• Sabbath School quarterly lessons — no cleanly licensed source identified yet.

• Languages other than English.