In July, I started working for CODEC (University of Durham, although thankfully I only have to commute to Premier Radio in London!). My brief is to work with the text “Matthew for Everyone” by Tom Wright (former Bishop of Durham), to produce “blended learning” material (i.e. online/offline) to work with this text, with the potential for future texts.
The Vision
Over Lent 2010, “The Big Read” was carried out in Durham, and it was so successful, there was a clear need to make this national, and the project for 2011 ties in with Biblefresh: “Our vision is to make 2011 a year of the Bible to help individuals and the whole church gain greater skill in handling the scriptures and a greater passion for hearing and obeying the Bible.” Biblefresh was partly inspired by the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible, the first time that the Bible was translated into English (rather than Latin). I have spent the first month talking to various people about ideas for the project, and we’re planning on doing a crowd-sourcing project… as a Twitter addict, one of my first ideas was to do “something with Twitter” (we have an account: @bigbible)… and then this week decided that one idea was already going to happen much better (although of course there’s potential for more than one person to do this, people will have different interpretations)…
@biblesummary
Seven days ago, Chris Juby sent out his first tweet via @biblesummary:
I was alerted to the project through a Tweet from @pmphillips (director of CODEC!), and immediately followed (one of the first 80!) & Tweeted about it, as well as posting comments on the website, suggesting that Chris use, e.g. ‘&’ rather than ‘and’, but apparently he’s a ‘glutton for punishment’. Wonder if I have any part to play in the success story… I got quite a few retweets from various tweets sent throughout the week… but really, the project is genius in its simplicity and stands on its own feet:
A Success Story
A lot of which I reckon is down to good old fashioned press coverage… and of course plenty of Tweets:
- Northern Echo
- Guardian
- Daily Mail
- Telegraph
- and as Chris Juby says (and can be seen by a Google search, stories all over the world)
The biggest coup, however, is getting @Mashable to talk about it, the most influential man on Twitter: “One Man will Try to Tweet the Bible over Three Years“.
When I started this article 25 minutes ago, he had 999 followers, he now has 1084 followers (9:52am), and I expect his numbers to shoot sky high. A real success story – congratulations!!
How can I get involved?
Follow @biblesummary on Twitter, a stream which is PURELY for Tweeting the Bible – to comment & interact go to the website.