I just read about a guy on a quest that seems almost as daunting as the rich man’s challenge to thread a needle with his camel. Chris Juby, a worship director at King’s Church in the northern English city of Durham, has determined that he will summarize the Bible in a series of daily tweets—one for each chapter. You read that right: One 140-character string for each of the 1,189 chapters in the Good Book.
The first chapter was boiled down to a simple, “Gen1: God created the heavens, the earth and everything that lives. He made humankind in his image, and gave them charge over the earth.” Hey, this guy even did the job with four whole characters to spare. Talk about a gift for succinctness.
(Of course, my wife would say that all men are genetically programmed to keep their statements to the shortest number of words possible—just to torture the females in their lives. But that’s another story.)
“It’s a really tough process deciding what the key themes of each chapter are and what can be left out,” Juby told aolnews.com. “There’s so much richness in each chapter of the Bible.”
I was thinking that even the less rich chapters could be a real headache. But Juby seems up to the challenge. He whittled down the Genesis begetting chapter (chapter 5) to this: “Adam’s line was: Seth, Enosh, Kenan, Mahalalel, Jared, Enoch, Methuselah, Lamech and Noah. Noah’s sons were Shem, Ham and Japheth.”
Count it up and you’ll see that Juby had enough space to say “Adam’s family line” if he had wanted to. But he obviously figured, “Hey, they’ve got it, why blather on?”
Personally, I think this is an interesting exercise. And if folks are curious enough to see what the unabridged version reads like after catching a snappy tweet of a chapter or two, well, all the better. Besides, if the finished Twitter Bible finds its way to the right person’s inbox … it could do wonders for the sermon times.
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