Three ACU staff members have tweeted their way into the book of Joshua on a 1,189-day plan to tweet the entire Bible.

ACU technology support specialists Nathanial Jones, Kent West and Chris Rhodes started tweeting on Apr. 14 in a project they call “140 Bible.”

Jones and Rhodes read online that someone had tried tweeting the Bible but stopped after a couple months.

“In passing I said, ‘We should tweet the Bible,'” Jones said. “Chris really got it started – he set up the Twitter account, got our Facebook started and made our logo.”

Jones and Rhodes quickly realized they would need more manpower for the plan to work, so they enlisted the help of West.

“Kent writes a lot of tweets, or at least the first draft of them,” Rhodes said. “We all write here and there, but Kent writes the majority of them.”

The team reads each chapter and boils it down to the main points, which they squeeze into a 140-character message. Jones said it can be a challenge to fit all the main points into a tweet and still make the message readable.

“There’s no way we can get everything, but we try to hit all the main points,” Jones said. “We try not to be really obscure with a lot of abbreviations, but we have to abbreviate some things.”

The first tweet from 140 Bible read, “Gen1-God created the earth & heavens in 6 days. Light. Waters. Land & plants. Birds & fish. Land dwellers. Adam & Eve. All very good.”

The team isn’t trying to replace the Bible and simply hopes to encourage daily reading and conversation. Rhodes said his goal is to make himself read the Bible more and encourage others to read it and think about what they read.

“I hope people see the short snippet and see what’s happening real quick,” Rhodes said. “If something strikes their interest, they can pick up a real copy of the Bible and know what chapter to turn to.”

140 Bible can be found on Twitter at www.twitter.com/140bible, or on Facebook at www.facebook.com/140bible.