Creating a Bible Reading Plan

Throughout our marriage, Julie and I have often started the year with a plan to read through the Bible. Our routine has been to do our reading at mealtimes — usually with me reading aloud and Julie listening.

We’ve done various plans: We’ve tried straight read-throughs and a couple different chronological approaches. Some years we have finished, others years…not quite. But it has been a good thing for our marriage.

We’ve discovered these last couple of years with kids that mealtimes are no longer a good time for family Bible reading — at least not reading the quantities necessary for finishing the whole book in a year. We’ve also had enough moves to make it hard to get into a good routine. And so our habit of yearly readings has fallen to the wayside.

This year we’re going to try to start again. With our changing family situation, we’ve resigned ourselves to doing our readings separately at whatever moments we can find, while still trying to make time to discuss what we’ve read.

And we’re going to try something new. I’ve discovered an idea for a plan where you read a different section of the Bible each day of the week. So (for example), you read the Old Testament Law on Mondays, Old Testament history on Tuesday, etc. It sounds interesting, and it’s not something we’ve tried before.

I found three different plans where you read a different genre each day of the week, but none of them were exactly what I was looking for. After examining plans from Douglas Kelly, Denis Haack, and Michael Coley, I ended up coming up with my own 52-week plan.

Kelly’s Plan

The simplest version I came across is from Douglas Kelly’s book If God Already Knows Why Pray? He divides the Bible into the following sections for each day of the week:

Sunday: Poetry (Psa – Song)

Monday: Law (Gen – Deut)

Tuesday: OT History (Josh – 2 Kgs)

Wednesday: OT History (Job, 2 Chr – Esth)

Thursday: Prophecy (Isa – Mal)

Friday: Gospels and Acts (Matt – Acts)

Saturday: NT Epistles (Rom – Rev)

You read 5 chapters on Sundays and 3 every other day. That makes it very simple and easy to remember. However, the tradeoff for simplicity is that none of the days of the week quite finish at the 52 week mark:

Kelly’s solution: When you finish all of the readings for one day of the week, use that day to do a reading from an unfinished section. So everything still works out (although I suspect you’ll end up reading from the prophets every day in December…).

Haack’s Plan (for “Slackers and Shirkers”)

I found a tweaked version of Kelly’s plan done by Denis Haack of Ransom Fellowship called the “Bible Reading Plan for Slackers and Shirkers.” (I’m not a big fan of that name, though…) Basically, he has spread out the chapters from Kelly’s plan so that everything finishes evenly at the 52-week mark.

There are also nice adjustments for chapter length: For example, Psalm 119 (really long) is the only psalm you read one day, but when you have a section of shorter psalms you might read six in one day.

Even with these improvements, there still remains a problem with uneven sections. Look at the word counts for each section (using the KJV, which is close enough for our purposes):

Poetry (Sundays) and epistles (Saturdays) are light, while the days with the Pentateuch and Prophets are pretty brutal. Since the fluctuations are day-to-day, you at least don’t have to endure a continual beating. However, I still wasn’t completely satisfied with it.

Coley’s Plan

I’ll mention one other variant that found (but ultimately rejected). Michael Coley has created a similar plan at Bible-Reading.com:

Sunday: NT Epistles (Rom – Jude)

Monday: Law (Gen – Deut)

Tuesday OT History (Josh – Esth)

Wednesday: Psalms

Thursday: Poetry (Job, Prov – Song)

Friday: Prophets (Isa – Mal)

Saturday: NT History (Matt – Acts)

It’s a solid plan, but it has the day-to-day length variation that bugs me a little. And the days are even further apart than with Haack’s plan:

My Plan

Since I wasn’t really happy with the unevenness of any of those options, I decided to create my own plan.

I started with Haack’s plan, and shifted around the section divisions a little bit. On the chart, the red shows what I removed from each day, the green is what has been added, and the blue shows what was left unchanged:

Here’s what I’m doing:

First off, I slide Job into the start of the poetry. Makes sense, right? Next, since the Law is so big, I slide Deuteronomy over into the first day of OT history. I think this makes sense, too: Scholars actually call this historical section the “Deuteronomic history” because it has a similar theological perspective as the book of Deuteronomy. Deuteronomy also starts off with a nice recap of Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers, so it doesn’t really feel like your starting in the middle of the story. The next change is the one I’m least sure about. I bump 1 & 2 Kings into the second day of OT history. Those books really are part of the Deuteronomic history rather than the post-exilic history of Chronicles, Ezra, Nehemiah, and Esther. But, at least it’s all history. Finally, I take the minor prophets out of the huge Thursday section and create a “Small Book” day of minor prophets and NT epistles. Those aren’t really the same, but there are some similarities (apocalyptic passages in Daniel, Revelation, etc.). I think of it as still being two sections, just back-to-back.

The poetry still ends up a little light, but perhaps that’s good to give time for reflection. Otherwise, the amount of reading each day is close.

The last task was dividing each section into 52 roughly equal readings — one for each week of the year. I tried that first by hand, looking at word counts for each chapter. Then I discovered that Logos would do it for me, and they would even use section headings as a break if chapters needed to be split up intelligently.

(One other tweak I made for 2015: I rearranged the days of week so that we would start with Genesis 1 on January 1 — a Thursday this year. But there are lots of orders that would make sense, too.)

You can see the final checklists I came up with here:

Reading Plan 2015 (PDF)

(This is the view I like, which makes it easy if you get behind (or ahead) to simply read the next reading in the column for whatever day it is.)

Reading Plan with Dates 2015 (PDF)