Bible in a Year - The Scriptures of the Early Church

With 2020 drawing to a close and a new year about to start, many people will be looking for a bible reading plan for 2021. With that in mind, I wanted to share this plan I recently created for the coming year that I’m calling, “The Scriptures of the Early Church”.

You can find the plan here on google drive. Just go to File > Make a Copy to save off a copy for yourself.

Some highlights of the plan…

Less Than 15 Minutes a Day

I decided to make a new plan initially because I have always been annoyed by the inconsistent amount of time needed to complete daily readings in pretty much every reading plan I’ve used over the years. I like to read as part of my morning routine, but when one day of the plan has me reading the single chapter of Obadiah, and another day has me reading all of Ephesians, it’s hard to fit that into a consistent schedule.

Being a software developer I decided I could fix that, so I wrote a program to optimize a bible-in-a-year plan for the amount of time required for the reading each day. For this plan, most days’ readings are 12-14 minutes long based on timings from the Audio ESV (so likely under 10 minutes of actual reading time as compared to the audiobook narrator).

So if you can set aside 15 minutes a day for this plan, you will be guaranteed to complete each day’s reading with time to spare.

Psalms or Proverbs Every Day

Ever gotten bogged down trying to slog for weeks through Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy? For many people sections of law and history in the Old Testament can be harder to get through if that is all they are reading, so every day of this plan also includes a Psalm or chapter of Proverbs to help keep from getting bogged down in any part of the Scriptures.

Over the course of the year, you will read through both Psalms and Proverbs twice.

The Order of the Plan

The reason I call this plan “The Scriptures of the Early Church” is that it does not follow the modern, traditional order of books in our bibles. Instead, this plan seeks to read the Scriptures as they were had/written in the early church.

To this end, the Old Testament readings follow the TaNaK, the traditional Jewish ordering of the Scriptures, dividing the Old Testament into the Law, the Prophets, and the Writings. This was the structure used at the time when the apostles were authoring the New Testament books.

The New Testament is then ordered, as best as possible, based on modern scholarship, by the date each book was authored, and thus the order in which these books would have been available to the early church.

Using the plan in Google Sheets

I originally wanted to upload this plan to the Bible (YouVersion) app but that would require me to be a trusted content partner to be able to upload a new plan. So for now I am settling for putting this out there as a Google Sheet.

In the sheet there are four columns: a checkbox for each day to mark completion, the date, the primary reading, and the Psalm/Proverb reading.

Once you save a copy of the sheet, you can obviously view and update it online, but if you use the Google Drive app on your phone, it will automatically jump to the last place you left off each time you open the sheet. So if you pin the sheet, you will be able to quickly and easily find/check off the day’s reading in the app.

Want to do the plan with friends?

One of the great benefits of using an app like the Bible app for a reading plan is the ability to do a shared plan with friends. Google Drive will let you do that with this plan as well.

To add friends to the plan, simply share the sheet with whoever is part of the plan, granting each person Edit permissions. Then make a copy of the checkbox column for each person you add and put everyone’s name at the head of one of the checkbox columns. This will allow everyone you invite to view and mark off the day’s reading in a shared context.