About this calendar

Our ways of life in the twenty-first century can often make it difficult to live out the Gospel. Busyness, distraction, the pressures to achieve, earn, consume, and to project the right image, all hinder faithful living.

One response to this kind of pressure that the Church has used throughout centuries is to develop calendars to order life. These provide rhythm to days, weeks and months, and foster habits of faithfulness by practice and repetition.

This calendar is a simple, flexible plan to help you develop spiritual disciplines throughout the year. Each month contains both a simple reading plan that carries you through the Biblical narrative, and some thoughts and practical ideas for pressing into a particular habit or discipline.

We would encourage you to work through the reading and disciplines with others, so that you can wrestle together, encourage one another, and explore the narrative of Scripture in community.

How to use this calendar

Download the printable calendar, and the monthly reading and study guides (for example, February).

Each month offers suggested readings from Scripture (see below), and also a spiritual discipline, with suggested habits of living to practice. Take these, and adapt them to where you're at.

We suggest that you sign up for our email updates (see the right hand column), so that we can send you further resources and keep in touch.

We would encourage you to use this calendar together with others, so that it becomes not just an individual journey, but a community conversation.

If you would like to talk more about the calendar, email sam.bloore@compass.org.nz.

Reading the Bible

Reading the Bible is a lifelong journey – one where the aim is not mastery of the text or learning Sunday-school trivia, but immersion in its Story and the Person it reveals.

Reading the Bible takes time and focus, two things that are very hard in the twenty-first century. It will (and should) be at different times, a task, a joy, a struggle, a desperate resort and a familiar conversation.

Each month we offer a collection of readings from Scripture, designed to walk you through the Story of the Bible. You may choose to focus on the key passages, or you may take the opportunity to read the whole Bible. Whichever you choose, this Calendar isn’t intended to be something else you ‘just do’, or to add to any guilt you may feel about not reading the Bible ‘enough’, but we hope it will be a resource to help you navigate the text, and bring into focus your sense of the big picture.

Each month’s readings are grouped under four headings, with increasingly large chunks of Scripture referenced. Read what you can.

Key passages – we’ve chosen these because they’re critical to the overall story and structure of the Bible. Read them more than once; get to know the text and its place in the story well; think and meditate on them; pray about them.

Structural passages – we’ve chosen these passages because we think they expose and illustrate what is going on at this point in the Story. Read them and answer questions like, ‘where are we in the Story’, ‘what are the people of God like at this time’, ‘what are people hoping for’, and ‘how does this move the Story forward?’

Connecting the dots – these are passages chosen throughout Scripture that either look forward or reflect back on this particular part of the Story. We’ve chosen them to illustrate that the Bible is an interlinked whole, and you should read expecting to find more and more of these connections.

Reading the whole Bible – you may want to read the whole Bible throughout the year. There are many resources that will help you do this well, and we have grouped the books so that they line up with this Calendar. We recommend you also use as guides:

Gordon Fee & Douglas Stuart, How to read the Bible for all its worth (Grand Rapids, Zondervan, 2003)

Gordon Fee & Douglas Stuart, How to read the Bible book by book (Grand Rapids, Zondervan, 2002)