The equation for the magnetic lead field for a given magnetoencephalography (MEG) channel is well known for arbitrary frequencies ω but is not directly applicable to MEG in the quasi-static approximation. In this paper we derive an equation for ω = 0 starting from the very definition of the lead field instead of using Helmholtz's reciprocity theorems. The results are (a) the transpose of the conductivity times the lead field is divergence-free, and (b) the lead field differs from the one in any other volume conductor by a gradient of a scalar function. Consequently, for a piecewise homogeneous and isotropic volume conductor, the lead field is always tangential at the outermost surface. Based on this theoretical result, we formulated a simple and fast method for the MEG forward calculation for one shell of arbitrary shape: we correct the corresponding lead field for a spherical volume conductor by a superposition of basis functions, gradients of harmonic functions constructed here from spherical harmonics, with coefficients fitted to the boundary conditions. The algorithm was tested for a prolate spheroid of realistic shape for which the analytical solution is known. For high order in the expansion, we found the solutions to be essentially exact and for reasonable accuracies much fewer multiplications are needed than in typical implementations of the boundary element methods. The generalization to more shells is straightforward.