There are 1,189 chapters in the Bible. Last month a U.K. worship leader completed his three-and-a-half year project posting a summary of every single one of these chapters on Twitter. Each summary had to fit the Twitter post guidelines which allow for only 140 total characters in each tweet.
Chris Juby, the 30 year-old man who undertook this daunting task, posted one chapter summary a day until he finished with Revelation 22. He summarized it: “Rev22: The river of life flows from the throne of God. ‘Behold, I am coming soon. I am the beginning and the end.” Amen. Come, Lord Jesus!'” His Twitter account, @biblesummary, had nearly 30,000 followers by the time the project ended. Juby’s summaries have been retweeted almost 19,000 times and his website had 636,555 hits over the course of the project.
In 2010, Juby, the worship director at Kings Church in Durham, U.K., did not miss a single day or chapter as he completed the project in 1,189 days. He explains, “I’m pretty sure that there will be no more tweets at @biblesummary. That’s a painful decision. It’s social media insanity to abandon a Twitter account with 29,000 followers. But the intention was always to end up with an account with exactly 1,189 tweets and at the moment I can’t see any reason strong enough to go back on that.”
The responses to his project, Juby said, were not what he expected. “I thought it would be mainly people who went to church, but everyone who came into contact with the project was interested in finding out what was actually in the scripture.” He went on to explain that the overall response was very supportive, and that “people know the influence the Bible has had on Christians and general culture but a lot of people don’t feel confident enough to read the Bible themselves and actually know what’s in there. A lot of people were curious about following along so they could get a sense of what’s actually in there.”
He began the project with a motivation to focus his Bible reading. “I thought writing summaries would help me get to the heart of the chapters, and then decided to publish the summaries on Twitter.”
The summary tweet of Romans 8 was Juby’s favorite. It read, “The law of the Spirit has set you free. We are children of God and co-heirs with Christ. Nothing can separate us from the love of God.”
Check out his Twitter feed here. Scroll through and find some of your most-loved Scripture passages. Let us know which are your favorites in our comments section.
One of the highlights for me is his summary of Psalm 16: “Ps16: Protect me, O God! I have no good besides you. The LORD is my portion. I will not be shaken. In your presence is fullness of joy!”
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