On "Bibleneering"

Did the pioneering arrangement exist in the first century Christian congregation?

No. There were no arrangements for getting 70 hours of service a month for some and 50 hours a month for others. There weren’t arrangements to get 90 hours or 100 hours of service per month either—as modern day witnesses used to do.

So why do we have the pioneering arrangement in the congregation today?

Other congregational arrangements, such as Ministerial Servants, Elders, and missionaries or traveling overseers existed in the first century; pioneering did not.

The answer, I think, is obvious. 

When people commit to a specific sacrifice publicly and before Jehovah, it is more likely that they will follow through. When someone signs a paper saying that they vow to get 30 or 50 hours for a specific month, there is an added amount of proper pressure to complete that goal in comparison to a person that has a general goal of getting a lot of field service hours in a specific month.

It is a good thing that we have the pioneering arrangement.

Pioneering is like the modern-day vow of “Nazariteship.”

Why do we measure pioneering by hours instead of another result? For example, why is pioneering “getting 70 hours a month” instead of “getting 2 people brought into the truth per year” or something that isn’t measured by time? One reason is obvious. Territories and their respective fruitfulness will vary, however, an hour is an hour for you or for me. It is an equal measurement that can be fairly measured. 

Although, service quality is more important than quantity, it often naturally follows that quality of a skill will grow through quantity of time spent practicing it. The more you play a guitar, the better you will get at doing it.

There are other reasons besides the above points that explain why it is great that pioneering is measured in time instead of other units. This question could be interesting to meditate over.

Here’s a question—a strange question:

Why isn’t there such a thing as Bibleneering? 

A Bibleneer is someone that takes a certain amount of hours per month or per year to do a special burst of in depth bible studying.

There are Auxilary Bibleneers that can choose a specific month and vow to give 10 hours total that month to bible reading. 

The Regular Bibleneers do 15 hours a month, or really, 180 hours a year of Bible reading.

There are Special Bibleneers too. They read the bible for 20 hours a month, but they get a small stipend each month from the branch—ok that was really stretching the idea wasn’t it?

Let’s focus on Regular Bibleneering…

If you read thirty minutes a day, you will achieve your goal of 15 hours a month, but it’s best to get ahead for the sunny season! 

Why do we say get ahead for sunny season? 

During the rainy season you will likely have more time to curl up in a blanket at home and read the bible because it feels icky to go out, whereas during the sunny season, you will be out in service a lot and maybe not have as much time to stay home and read.

With Bibleneering, will every day of reading be super productive?

Is every day of field ministry super productive?

No. Sometimes I have great bible studies and I feel really good about my service time. Other times, I’m with my friends in an air-conditioned car and more time is spent in coffee shops than actually talking to people in the territory. However, being out in any form of service is better than not being out at all.

Similarly, with Bibleneering, there will be days where you pull out the Insight book, look up cross references, and deeply meditate on the deep prophecies of Daniel or Matthew. Other days, you flick on the Mp3 and let the measurements of the tabernacle from the second half of Exodus wash over you as you wash the dishes in your kitchen sink—but at least you’re listening to that instead of the silly lyrics in worldly music.

How do I sign up to be a Regular Bibleneer or Auxiliary Bibleneer?

Well, one way is to announce it on Instagram or other social media.

Is this a way to brag, or self-righteously toot your own horn before making a sacrifice as the Pharisees did? If you feel, that way, then of course there is nothing wrong with keeping your “vow” private.

However, we could also consider this:

When you sign up as a Regular Pioneer, it is announced publicly and received with applause of support. The purpose is not to brag.

There are three advantages to announcing pioneering publicly that I can think of off hand and more that perhaps you can think of.

1. Others know to support you in your vow
2. A public declaration adds an extra layer of positive peer pressure to complete your vow
3. The one making the vow can have a reasonable amount of rightful pride that he or she is making the vow

We can think about Daniel who made sure others saw him when he prayed, or how a vow of Nazariteship was definitely public. The motives for Daniel and the Nazarites were different, but in each case pride was not the motivating factor.

The point is, there is nothing wrong with announcing it publicly—it can usually be very helpful.

Everyone’s circumstances are different. Not everyone can read an hour of the bible each day. It would be irresponsible for some to do so!

But can you put aside just 10 hours total time for one month for reading the bible in the same way as some might take 50 hours from one month to Auxiliary pioneer?

Some take several months out of the year to Auxiliary Pioneer.

Maybe Bibleneering isn’t something you can do now. Maybe you can’t because you are already doing a heavy bible reading project like the ’60 day project.’

Hopefully though, you can arrange your circumstances so that you can Bibleneer in the near future.

Can you Bibleneer for the month of January?

#bibleneering

The Bible in Math

I'm glad to see that many friends of mine are now doing Bible projects of their own.

The "read the Bible in 60 days schedule" is something I really enjoyed but admittedly it is not a practical schedule for anyone and everyone.

With that in mind, I thought I'd just do a little bit of a breakdown of the Bible in terms of numbers with the goal of making the idea of reading the entire Bible more feasible.

Even if you are already doing your own consistent Bible reading schedule, I hope that you will find the data in his article helpful.

To start off with, I timed myself to see how long it would take to read one page of the Bible.
It took about three minutes.

After doing this I multiplied that number by the amount of pages that are in the Bible.
To come to that number it is very simple of course.
All I had to do was subtract the page number that Genesis chapter 1 starts off on from the page number that Revelation chapter 22 ends in.

What I got from that was the total number of minutes it would take to read the entire Bible. I converted this number into hours and found out that one can read the entire Bible in 78 hours.

Note: The figures in this chart that I made above differ slightly from the figures I gave in this article but on the whole they are about the same. I also forgot to put in that the Bible divides into 78 hours. You'll notice a line it says this divides into blank hours to read the Bible. I messed up on the chart and I'm to be easy to go back and make a new charge. Sorry. Also the original title was "the Bible in Numbers" but I've changed it to "the Bible in Math" for fear that some might think I was writing an article on the book of Numbers in the Bible and be deterred away from reading this article ;)

Of course this is all based on the assumption of it taking three minutes to read one page of the Bible.

There is a little bit of a problem of measuring the time it takes to read the entire Bible in this way.

The first reason is more obvious – people read at different speeds.
It took me three minutes to read one full page but another person might be slower or faster. However, I think that if you timed yourself, you would find that you could definitely finish a page in less than three minutes. I recommend you do that right now. If you do finish it in less than three minutes that means your total time for reading the entire Bible will be less than 78 hours!

The second factor may not be something that you think of right away.
The amount of words per page varies.
Reading a solid block of text in Ezekiel or Genesis will take longer than reading a poetic page in the book of Psalms. If you look at how many words per page there are on each of these pages it will be obvious that the words in the book of Psalms is much less than those in the other two.

With this in mind I made my "timed" page a page of block text so that I would get a conservative estimate of hours when I added everything up.

--

Now that we have the figure 78 hours we can easily calculate different types of Bible reading schedules.
Perhaps one schedule you could undertake is the "read the Bible in three days with no sleep schedule." Since there are 24 hours in a day, and 72 hours in three days you might have to read a little faster than normal to finish within three days.
I also recommend getting lots of coffee, ice blankets, a personal chef to feed you, an assistant to keep slapping you in the face every time you start to doze off and perhaps headache medicine if you want to undertake this project.

For those of you who are less extreme about their Bible reading habits, want to get as much as they can out of it and don't want to do a schedule that could result in the need for hospitalization afterward I am happy to say there are some other possibilities.

Based on the 78 hour estimate, If you read an hour a day you will finish in – okay the math shouldn't be that hard for this one – 78 days.
How about we just say 80 days and give yourself two days to be lazy.

If you read the Bible at a pace of 30 minutes a day, you could finish it in around five months – 160 days.
If you read the Bible 15 minutes a day you could finish it in 320 days or one year with a lot of days for breaks – 45 days to be exact as there are 365 days a year.

Works best for you? Please don't automatically assume that the 15 minutes a day schedule will work best because you are busy.
One – we are all busy.
Two – some of the quicker paced schedules could be easier to do since a deadline is near in sight.

What is a good way to get started with reading the Bible? Should you read it in the order of the books from front to back (Genesis to Revelation)? Should you read it in chronological order?

One method I think it might be worth trying is reading it in order of books size from largest to smallest because this helps you get over the hump quickly and stay motivated to finish the project.

If you read the six biggest books of the Bible you will have read one third of the Bible.
The six biggest books are, in order, Psalms, Jeremiah, Genesis, Isaiah, Ezekiel and Exodus.
Note: I calculated this or not by counting pages, but instead by comparing the MP3 file size of each of these books of the Bible. This method I think is more accurate in calculating an actual book size.

This way you'll be getting the "worst" out of the way.
These books are not only long, they are also rather difficult to read. Genesis is the only exception where it's entertaining to read all the way through and there are many interesting stories and narratives.
You may think that Exodus is interesting but you may be only thinking about the first part of it– everything that happens in the movie the 10 Commandments. This part is action-packed and very exciting. The second half is a little bit more difficult.

In my opinion Ezekiel and Isaiah are the most difficult books of all to get through. There are also many good Psalms but it is long and there is repetition.

Difficult Books of the Bible:

Ezekiel - Lots of temple measurements and details
Leviticus - The section about leprosy and its different kinds was trying
Isaiah and Jeremiah - Great books with wonderful prophecies and good points scattered throughout, but overall a little bit difficult to read. The same principle applies for a lot of the books of the little prophets
Job (middle part) and Exodus (second half) -really, anything written by Moses besides the book of Genesis and the first part of Exodus is going to be a little bit tough to get through. (The specifics of the Mosaic law, measurements and instructions for building things, information on lineage, etc…)

Books that weren't as difficult as I thought they would be: Numbers (sure there are lots of numbers but they were more narratives in this book than I remembered), First and Second Chronicles (I thought this was mostly lineage but there are a lot of interesting stories that overlap the stories of the kings of Judah from the book of first and second Kings)

I am definitely not trying to critique the Bible or say that these parts are less important. For sure, every part of the Bible is important but, also for sure, some parts are much easier to read it than others.

Some of my favorite books to read in the Bible were Ecclesiastes, Judges, Ruth, first and second Samuel, Luke, Acts... and I really don't think there's one single boring letter that Paul ripped. There's a lot of depth going on there and a lot of practical information.

I hope you found this blog post useful.
Remember if you fall behind on whatever schedule you are doing make a note of it and then read a double portion to catch up. Or better yet, reading big portions and get ahead in your Bible reading time so that you can afford to take days off.
The regular pioneer hourly requirement per month is 70 hours. This doesn't mean that you have to go out in service 2 hours and 15 minutes every day. You could instead go out for five or six hours on one day and then take a couple of days off. The early in the month early in the week early in the day principal works for Bible reading as it does with service time for pioneers.

Keep up your Bible reading and remember that the main purpose of it is not just to increase your biblical knowledge – it is to get to know him become closer friends with Jehovah – the one who had the book written in the first place.

In the words of Gerrit Losch: "Please don't tell the creator of the universe that you don't have time to read his book every day."