Last year, on January 1 alone, over 3 million people subscribed to one-year Bible reading plans on YouVersion. Millions more downloaded read-in-a-year podcasts; The Bible Recap was the most popular show of any genre on New Year’s Day 2024, and The Bible in a Year with Fr. Mike Schmitz wasn’t far behind.
Old-fashioned paper Bible sales are up in general as well, and around the new year is presumably the most popular month to buy offerings like The One Year Chronological Bible or The Bible Recap 365-Day Chronological Study Bible. Empty checkboxes sit next to chapter numbers, just waiting to be ticked off.
This is all good news, right? Sort of.
Bible-in-a-year plans do offer a clear pathway to daily Scripture engagement. Ideally, they create sustained habits. They encourage readers to move beyond their favorite books and finally tackle tricky ones. For those who succeed, they provide a sense of accomplishment. All good things.
But the plans are also far from perfect, and given their increasing popularity, it’s essential to consider their drawbacks:
- They prioritize quantity over quality, often leading to shallow understanding and low levels of retention while underplaying the role of meditation and prayer in processing Scripture.
- They teach us to read Scripture quickly in isolation rather than slowly in church community.
- They impose human ambitions on a living Word—a Word with its own purposes beyond ours.
- Participants find themselves tempted by self-reliant pride when they’re keeping up the pace and shame when they fall behind.
Reading too cursorily is better than not reading at all. But in my experience, the latter is often the result of Bible-in-a-year plans, which are rarely completed. As a ministry leader, church volunteer, and Bible teacher, I’ve watched scores of people start January in Genesis—peers, older women, small group members. I can count on one hand the number who’ve made it to Revelation by December.
In the majority of cases, failure to keep the plan led those people to quit reading the Bible daily altogether. Maybe they’d have stopped spending time in Scripture no matter their strategy—that’s possible. But the scale and pace of these one-year plans seem particularly problematic.
YouVersion doesn’t publish completion rates for year-long plans, and download rates for podcasts aren’t particularly helpful information (most plan-beginners subscribe to a new show, meaning every episode is downloaded to their phones whether or not they listen). But in 2014, Bible Gateway did share its Bible-in-a-year statistics with Christianity Today.
Back then, plan participation peaked on January 1 and dropped 30 percent in the first week. By the end of February, reading plan traffic had dropped by a third, and by May, half. These numbers are only slightly higher than the percentage of people who persevere in keeping any given resolution.
Why are so many people quitting? Lots of reasons. Two stand out.
First, the state of reading. Consider the data: More than 50% of US adults haven’t finished a book in the past year, and 22% haven’t finished a book in three years. Less than 9% of American adults read poetry. (One-third of the Bible is poetry.) Approximately 20% of Americans have a reading disability that impairs their ability to read quickly and in large quantities, and 54% of adults have a literacy below sixth-grade level (the NIV Bible is translated at an eighth-grade level).
According to the National Endowment for the Arts, “Reading itself is a progressive skill that depends on years of education and practice.” If Americans aren’t practicing the skill of reading, we cannot expect them to be competent Bible readers.
Podcasts and audio Bibles help in this regard, but they’re not a magic bullet. Other than for folks with reading disabilities, listening likely won’t result in better comprehension and retention than reading printed text. And audio doesn’t address the related crises of declining attention spans and waning critical thinking skills.
Americans aren’t very good at reading, and the Bible is a difficult book to read. Read it in a year? Three chapters a day, every day? The average church attendee is doomed from the start.
One-year plans often do “work” for habitual readers. In their cases, the difficulty of the task is a stretch but not a leap. Personally, I’ve read the Bible in a year three times—but reading is my occupation and I had read most of Scripture at least once before my attempt. Even then, reading in a year was difficult (and I never hit the infamous “just 20 minutes a day” benchmark). Which introduces the next reason most people fail.
The established goal of read-the-Bible-in-a-year plans is straightforward—but in order to achieve it, most readers need to develop a habit of daily reading. Unfortunately, one-year plans aren’t structured in a way that optimizes habit-building.
According to behavioral scientists, habits are made by setting small, easy goals and adjusting those goals incrementally over time. That’s the principle at the heart of the hugely popular book Atomic Habits. As author James Clear writes, “Rather than trying to do something amazing from the beginning, start small and gradually improve. Along the way, your willpower and motivation will increase, which will make it easier to stick to your habit for good.”
Clear’s work also emphasizes the importance of making habits enjoyable by prioritizing systems over results: “When you fall in love with the process rather than the product, you don’t have to wait to give yourself permission to be happy. You can be satisfied anytime your system is running.”
One-year plans divide the Bible into large, equal-sized chunks rather than starting small. They quickly arrive at some of the most complicated books, like Leviticus. And they provide little along-the-way training to help Bible readers become better readers—it’s impossible to both cover the material and offer substantive assistance in 20 minutes per day.
In my experience reading the Bible with Christian college students, most need to stop every two or three verses for explanation. They may need help with theological vocabulary words. They may have questions about God’s character. They may wonder what’s going on when their values bump up against what they’re reading.
But most of their questions are ones of simple comprehension: Who is that again? What did he do? What’s he saying? Why did he say that? Rushing by these clarifications means missing out on even a shallow understanding of what’s happening. Does reading the Bible count as reading the Bible if you don’t know what it means?
I have seen young people fall in love with Bible reading, but reading fast is not the way.
Quick, big-goal plans drain willpower and overemphasize the importance of the stated goal (reading the whole Bible at pace) rather than fostering actual motivation for reading the Word. Readers can’t be satisfied anytime their system is running, because they’re usually falling behind in reaching their goals.
Sometimes it’s a fine idea to sit down and read a whole book of the Bible in one gulp or perhaps to listen to it read aloud that way, as the early church did. But sometimes is the operative word.
Say you want to read more Scripture this year. What’s most likely to work?
Because attention spans are short and habits are still being formed, new Bible readers should start small and go slow. A psalm a day. A gospel read at a manageable pace. Instead of skimming the entire Sermon on the Mount in one day (day 259 of a one-year plan) and moving on, take the text in digestible portions, allowing time to research your questions and consider applications.
Because most people don’t yet enjoy reading the Bible, new readers should integrate Bible reading into activities they do love and celebrate reaching milestones. Read the Bible with your morning coffee. Read it with someone you enjoy being with—a friend, a spouse. Read it on your porch. Read it right after exercise while flooded with endorphins. And then reward yourself for faithfully showing up. Buy a new highlighter or a scone at your favorite bakery. Listen to a favorite song that only gets played when you hit an established goal. Pray a psalm of celebration.
Because reading is difficult for many and the Bible an especially difficult book, new readers should also always seek out teachers—not just online voices but actual flesh-and-blood people who can answer questions in real time. This might look like weekly meetings with a mentor or an organized Bible study at a local church.
I built my appetite for Scripture alongside my grandfather. I followed him to Bible studies and watched his face as he explained the tricky parts to curious church members. He glowed with passion and joy. I wanted to love the Bible like he loved the Bible. Eventually I did.
I learned discipline in Bible reading at a church fellowship hall studying Daniel around white plastic tables. I was a young mother among a dozen retirees. Their dedication to study inspired me to be dedicated too. As the study progressed, I read more and more faithfully.
Over the years, I’ve appreciated booklong reading plans from YouVersion or BibleProject. I’ve read books of the Bible alongside recommended commentaries. I’ve read the Bible in groups using the latest Beth Moore or Priscilla Schirer study. And I’ve read the Bible with my kids.
But nothing worked as well as simply choosing a spot to read, leaving my Bible there, showing up every day with a hot coffee, and giving myself permission to read as little or as much as I wanted to. Some days that looked like ten verses. Some days a whole book. When I miss, I’m not devastated or embarrassed. There are no chapters to make up. Just a hot coffee and the spot on the couch I like and a book I love to read in the presence of a God I love to read about.
When readers have successfully developed both the appetite and discipline required to read the Bible, then it’s time to consider reading the whole thing. Passion and habit will lead the way.
Small goals and slow reading won’t appeal to everyone. Part of the reason yearlong plans are so popular is that they offer a quick path to the desired goal of “having read” the Bible.
Not unlike a bucket list (see all the national parks, eat at all the pizza places in a city, travel to every continent) or Pokémon (catch ’em all), this desire is often at least partly about acquisition and achievement.
Perhaps the first step for the modern American church is to forget about winning and scoring and “having done” a thing, and to learn to love the game—growing in love and knowledge of the Lord, however long that takes.
JL Gerhardt leads Bible meditation at Deep Water. Slow Reading. She’s the author of the audio memoir The Happiest Saddest People.
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