Crafting a Bible Reading Plan

Starting Christmas, my wife and I committed to separating 1-2 hours a day to read the Bible together. Our plan is to read, discuss, and reflect on all the Scriptures by Christmas 2026. While I've followed other "Bible-in-a-year" plans, they tend to focus exclusively on chronological, Book-order, or topical plans. Each style has its strengths and weaknesses.

  • Chronological readings are great for seeing the narrative of human history unfold. However, they tend to have lengthy non-narrative sections that require us to pause the story, especially during the arcs of David and Solomon.
  • Book-order readings tend to follow each book in order (reading the Bible cover-to-cover). While this allows for the simplicity of focusing on one book at a time, the book order gets through most of the Narrative first, again resulting in long sections where the story is "paused".
  • Topical plans tend to start with a topic (e.g. love, suffering, etc.) and then list chapters and verses related to that topic. This is my least favorite for an exhaustive reading order as it can lead to ignoring context or trying to repurpose the meaning of certain texts to fit into the plan.

Because of these and other reasons, we wanted to follow a plan that could strike a balance between these three, allowing us to follow the overarching narrative of human history, start and finish books without long pauses between them, and connect poetic and prophetic readings to their historical context, all leading up to the story of salvation. Ultimately, we made the decision to develop our own Bible reading plan.

To develop our plan, we looked at other well-crafted resources for inspiration and guidance. Some of these are:

I will add more resources to the list as they become available.

The Next Step is to craft the plan! We started reading on Christmas Day, giving us a week's head start to make necessary changes and corrections to the plan in order to share it before the year starts. I'll write follow-up posts to discuss our progress.