The Schedule — Reading through the Bible in a Year

Ready to read through the Bible beginning in July?

Each Sunday, beginning on July 1, I’m going to post the reading schedule for the week. In that post, I’ll also add some hopefully helpful commentary with the Old Testament and New Testament passages, nothing technical, just a way of thinking about the passages in case you’re unsure.

Even if you ignore what I write, I heartily encourage you to post a response each week that shares what you discovered, or learned, or have a question about.  Don’t be shy. This isn’t a test and this won’t involve judgment.  How would we learn to do anything if we were afraid of making mistakes at first?

Learning how to respond to Scripture is one of the key ways we learn about it. Passive learning doesn’t do much. It’s shown that just writing a little bit in response can help it stick better in your head.  Gets you thinking.

I also don’t want you to depend on my posts to know what to read each week, so here’s the complete schedule for the year on a handy pdf:  TRC Communal-Reading-of-Scripture-One-Year-Schedule

You can also find printed copies on the resource table at TRC on Sundays. Or scroll down to see the full schedule in a handy chart.

There’s a lot of different reading plans out there, so why did I choose this one? Well, the main reason is that it has a creative approach. I’ve read through the Bible in different ways over the years, and one of the more difficult ways is to read straight through, beginning to end. That has a lot of benefits, but it can get bogged down and even repetitive at times.

This one mixes things up. Having some Psalms, and OT reading, and a NT reading each week helps add variety and it also gives us a sense of the whole as we go through the year.

It’s a bit like instead of building a structure block by block, like reading through the year can be, we’re filling in a circle.  We see the initial shape, then over time the circle gets more and more color. As we add shading to different parts of the circle, it will eventually be full.

I also like it because it’s a weekly rather than daily schedule, and that gives us all a lot more flexibility in keeping up.  Some days are busier than others and this way we can adapt to what happens in life.

I suggest breaking the readings into at least 5 days, maybe the first set of Psalms on Monday, split the OT passages up over Tuesday and Wednesday, the NT passage on Thursday, and the closing set of Psalms on Friday.  That’s just a suggestion.  Find a schedule that works for you.

Here’s where I got it.

That link has a great intro video, and links to both text and audio of all the passages.

So there you go.  I encourage you to bookmark this post so you can refer to it if you need the reading list or reading links again.

Happy reading and happy responding. We start in a week!

Oh, and for those of you who like charts on blogs here’s the entire schedule:

TRC Communal Reading of Scripture 1-Year Schedule

Remember to go to theriverchurch.net/blog to add your questions, comments, insights to the weekly conversation

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