How Emmaus handles distress and crisis

Emmaus is an open-source AI Bible study companion. This page describes, in public, what it does when someone using it is struggling — so you can check it, and hold us to it.

What Emmaus is not

Emmaus is a study companion. It is not a person, not a pastor, not a doctor, and not a licensed mental-health professional. It cannot tell you what is wrong with you and it cannot care for you the way a trained human being can. It does not speak for God.

How risk is detected

Every message passes through a safety check before the study engine answers.

1. A fixed keyword and phrase tripwire runs first. It is deliberately narrow, it is deterministic, it runs offline, and it cannot invent anything. It includes an allowlist so that Scripture about death, despair and suffering — Job 3, Psalm 88, Jonah 4, "the wages of sin is death" — does not set it off.
2. A small, separate AI model reads the last few turns and returns a risk level. It is a separate call from the one that answers you, so if the main model is manipulated, this one still runs.
3. The model that answers you also reports what it thinks it is dealing with.

The highest level any of the three returns is the one used. If the classifier is slow or unavailable, the app assumes emotional distress and shows support resources — it never assumes everything is fine.

Within a conversation the level only goes up, never down.

What Emmaus does at each level

• 0 — Normal study. Ordinary teaching, with citations you can tap.
• 1 — Spiritual struggle. Doubt, distance from God, unanswered prayer. Emmaus listens first, treats lament as biblical rather than as failure, offers one passage rather than a lecture, and suggests talking to a real person as well.
• 2 — Emotional distress. Emmaus stays with what you said before offering Scripture, says plainly that this is not a spiritual failure, shows a region-matched support line as an option, and does not end the conversation.
• 3 — Self-harm risk. Emmaus asks directly whether you are having thoughts of ending your life, shows the crisis line prominently in the app, and encourages you to tell one real person. Talking about God is never a condition of getting help.
• 4 — Imminent danger. Short, calm messages, the emergency number and crisis line immediately, and a request to put distance between you and anything you could use to hurt yourself, and to get to another person.

What Emmaus will never do

• Blame your suffering, doubt, or depression on your sin or weak faith.
• Tell you what condition you have.
• Suggest that medicine prescribed to you is a lack of faith.
• Give any method or means information about self-harm, under any framing.
• Say that suicide is a sin, unforgivable, or selfish.
• End the conversation, refuse to engage, or lock your account because you are struggling.
• Contact anyone on your behalf. Emmaus has no way to verify where you are.
• Invoke submission, honouring parents, or forgiveness at someone describing abuse.
• Reassure a person caught in a religious-guilt loop over and over. The assurance is given once, plainly, and then the app points to a pastor and to a professional who works with OCD.
• Invent a phone number. Every number comes from a versioned file in the repository with the date it was verified.

Crisis resources

Crisis numbers live in packages/core/src/safety/resources.json, each with the date it was last verified and the source it was verified against. They are rendered by the app, never generated by the AI. Numbers we could not verify are excluded and the reason is recorded in the code.

How this is tested

The tier rules and the phrase tripwire are covered by automated tests, including a red-team fixture set of user phrases labelled with the level each should reach — direct and indirect phrasing, Taglish, grief, panic, abuse disclosure, and Bible passages about death and suffering that must stay at level 0. Recall at levels 3 and 4 is reported separately from overall accuracy, because a missed level-3 message is a catastrophic error and a false alarm is a mild one.

Reporting a failure

If Emmaus responded badly to someone in distress, please open an issue in the repository. Include what was said and what came back, with identifying details removed. Safety failures are treated as the highest-priority bugs in the project.