Runway to Daily Bible Reading (Bible in a Year)
A gentle on-ramp into daily Bible reading that starts at five or six minutes a morning and builds to a steady twelve or thirteen over the first six months.
Printable PDF Open in Google Sheets
If you want to build a habit of daily Bible reading, it often doesn’t help to begin with a plan written for people who already have the time and the rhythm of daily reading baked into their day. This plan is designed to be a runway to help you slowly establish the habit in your life. It starts slow, with just five or six minutes of reading in the morning, and gradually picks up speed over the first six months, until it settles into a comfortable cruising pace of about twelve to thirteen minutes a morning for the rest of the year.
Each day pairs that morning reading with a shorter evening reading, so the Word frames both ends of the day, and together they carry you through the whole Bible across the year.
The Morning Reading
Works steadily through the whole of Scripture, every book outside Psalms and Proverbs, in the early-church reading order described below. Readings begin as a single short chapter and lengthen gradually as the months go on.
The Evening Reading
A single psalm each night (Psalm 119 divided across two evenings), then on through the chapters of Proverbs, and back again to Psalm 1, so the Psalms grow familiar through the rhythm of the year.
The morning reading follows the “Scriptures of the Early Church” strategy, ordering the books roughly as the early church would have encountered them: the Old Testament in the traditional Jewish order of the books (the TaNaK), and the New Testament in the order the books appear to have been written, as best we can tell today.
The full day-by-day schedule is in the printable PDF and Google Sheet linked at the top of this page.