About the Project
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By 2013, I had been reading and studying the Bible regularly for about 30 years, often using various Bible reading plans including one called the Christadelphian Bible Companion. But like many people, I could “do my readings” and yet not really pay attention. I made the usual New Year’s resolutions to do better, but they often didn’t stick, so in early 2013 I decided to force myself to interact with the text rather than merely read it. I built a simple spreadsheet—one row for each of the 1,189 chapters—and made myself write a short title and a summary for every single one.
After some experimentation with summaries of different lengths, I soon settled on a series of size-doubled summaries for every chapter of the Bible (30, 60, 120, 240, and 480 character limits). The shortest summaries are limited to 30 characters, and I tend to think of these as my chapter titles. The longest summaries are limited to 480 characters, which is about the length of a paragraph. Having summaries of different lengths was useful beyond the mere act of writing them, because depending on what kind of chapter preview/review I was doing, the different summaries met different needs.
I soon realized that I also wanted a light daily review on top of whatever reading plan I was following, and quickly settled on the idea of reviewing eight random chapters a day. They weren’t purely random, because if they were, I’d hit the same chapter two days in a row and then not see others for months. A small routine spreads them out fairly evenly while still keeping the surprise of not knowing exactly what’s coming. The main goal each day was to learn at least one new thing about each of those eight chapters and commit this to memory. I also built a simple way to quiz myself on the same chapters a few times over the next month, which helped with long-term retention. Eight chapters a day means it takes about five months to touch every chapter in the Bible—a little less than two and a half full passes a year. It doesn’t feel like much on day one or day three. But before long, the whole Bible starts to feel like one connected story instead of a collection of famous pieces that I only half-remember. After several years the difference in how well I know the parts that aren’t the usual Sunday-school stories is hard to miss.
Studying chapters in a mostly random order can look strange, but it has some real advantages. It’s actually how most of us meet the Bible anyway. A commentary will jump from Genesis to the Psalms to Romans to some minor prophet. A speaker at the local church does the same thing. A word-study tool lists verses scattered all over. And in ordinary life we suddenly remember a Bible story and have to figure out who said it and where it is in the Bible. In other words, the Bible already comes at us out of order. There is something useful about practicing that way on purpose. After more than thirteen years of reviewing random chapters each day, I also keep noticing connections between chapters that don’t look related at first. If you only ever read straight through, you miss most of those.
Straight-through reading has its own weakness. When you hit a stretch that feels too hard, too dull, too irrelevant, or even too familiar, it’s easy to skim or skip. The opening genealogies of 1 Chronicles are the classic “too hard” example; a lot of people just jump over them. Familiar passages like the flood story or the Sermon on the Mount can be “too easy”—you know them so well that they slide by, and then a month later you can’t quite place the details because you never had to recall them out of context. A spaced, semi-random review keeps every chapter in circulation.
Over time I started adding more notes to the daily review: which chapters run parallel to each other, where a chapter quotes something earlier or gets quoted later, major cross-references, and other bits of context. I also built a second spreadsheet that worked like flash cards for verses. Sometimes it showed me a reference and I had to remember the words; sometimes it showed the words and I had to remember the reference. That spreadsheet became the working prototype for the Verse Recognition tool on the site.
In the spring of 2025 I started making a PowerPoint presentation for every chapter. A lot of the content came straight from the notes I’d already been making over the previous dozen years. The rest came from maps, charts, family trees, and pictures—some I made, some I bought. A few of the purchased pieces had copyright limits, so while I could use them myself and show them in a live class, I couldn’t hand them out for free download. Once the presentations were built I began pulling them together according to the two plans I was already following: the Bible Companion and the daily eight chapters. Looking at a picture or map or a simple chart each day didn’t replace careful reading, but it made the basic shape of a chapter much easier to keep in mind.
Sometime in the summer of 2025 I decided that I wanted to share these tools by building a website. I pictured five tools for the website at launch: an app that did what my main spreadsheet did, another app for the verse flash cards, a downloadable library of PowerPoints with the copyrighted pieces removed, a set of reading plans, and two daily videos that would walk through the Bible Companion and the eight-chapter review respectively. I registered the domain and started. The immediate problem was that I am not a programmer, not a designer, and not someone who knows how to build apps or edit video. I began learning anyway. Work continued in the background while I finished my career as an air traffic controller, and now my recent retirement has finally given me the time to treat the site as a full-time project.
In August 2026 a Christadelphian friend whose day job involves artificial intelligence stopped by and showed me a few things. With that little bit of help I was suddenly able to get prototype versions of the two apps running, and the pace picked up. As I learned more about what these large language models can and cannot do—and what their weaknesses/problems are—I started using them as part of the development process. I mention this in part to be fully transparent about the fact that I have used (and am using) some large language model A.I. engines to develop the website, but also to point out that large portions of the website are NOT designed by AI in any way. At times, it might look like I just set AI up to everything while I barely lifted a finger, but that isn’t what happened. The core ideas and the bulk of the data were built by hand over thirteen years while I was working full-time, teaching flying on the side, and keeping up with church and family life. The first year of actual website work was done without any AI. Even after I started using it, the process has never been “tell the machine what I want and come back later.”
What I eventually settled on is a set of related AI projects that act a bit like a small staff. Some of them are research assistants; each one focuses on one slice of the chapter-level information, generally using my notes as a baseline. Others are assemblers; they take pieces of the information developed by the research assistants, and turn them into the documents and slide decks that show up on the site. I’m also planning a further layer that will bundle those chapter-level products into daily or plan-based collections.
These AI tools are amazingly powerful, but they also have a number of problems, including that they will openly lie to me about various things, they invent sources and so-called facts, and even when I think I have one of my AI tools working well, they are still subject to what is sometimes called LLM instruction drift, where they ignore explicit rules I have directed them to follow. I mention this to point out that while I am using AI to help develop the website and some of its content, it is not a hands-off process where I just tell AI to do all the work.
As I write this in October 2026, the actual tools to be rolled out on the website, and their timing, keeps changing. Also, the website project has so far been almost entirely a one-man project, but in the near future I am planning on assembling an advisory board of some kind that will then transform into the board of a more formal organization to continue development and maintenance of the site, potentially even after I am gone if our Lord doesn’t return soon.