A year ago today I put the finishing touches to the Bible Summary website and published my summary of Genesis 1 to zero followers.

365 summaries and over 50,000 characters later I published my summary of 1 Chronicles 28 to 19,513!

As many of you saw, the number of followers rocketed under the gaze of the media coverage shortly after I began, and continued rising steadily for a few weeks. But the hype inevitably gave way to the reality of a three-and-a-half year commitment, and in the recent months the increase in followers has mirrored the fortunes of Israel - levelling off and even falling sometimes.

Not that it's ever been about the number of followers, though. I've reached this one year mark with my focus very much in the same place as when I started: first and foremost the project is a way to discipline and deepen my own Bible reading.

It's been an eventful year for me more generally - not always an easy time to stay disciplined. Your retweets, replies and encouragements have helped a lot with keeping me motivated, so thank you!

The storm of newspaper articles and TV interviews had hardly died down last year when we found out that my wife was pregnant. Our son, Samuel, was born in July! There have been some pretty hard things along the way too, and the story that I've been summarising has become deeply entwined with everything that has gone on.

I think that's part of the point of reading Scripture: it's supposed to get bound up with our lives.

I've read through the Bible start-to-finish several times before, so one of the big surprises for me has been how much of a difference the process of summarising has made. I've been forced to notice all kinds of details and themes that I would usually gloss over without really understanding.

One of the biggest pay-offs has been with unpopular books like Leviticus and 2 Kings. The commitment to come up with (hopefully) evenly weighted summaries has meant that I've had to spend time with commentaries - understanding the geography, customs and genealogies that don't naturally interest me very much. My understanding of those books has increased dramatically!

The other pay-off has been in seeing the big picture. I've noticed things in summarising that I'm amazed I hadn't spotted before. For example, I don't think I appreciated how strongly these early books emphasise covenant. I knew in theory that 'covenant' was an important Old Testament theme, but I hadn't really felt the weight of it.

And that's just scratching the surface. Who knows what the impact of the project will have been by the time I finish!

Looking forward, I'll be starting 2 Chronicles on Wednesday, then on towards the Wisdom Literature (some of my favourite books!) This time next year I'll be in Isaiah, and in two years time I'll be on the home stretch. It all seems very doable now!

So here we go... 12 months down, 27 to go...

The genealogies have acted as some kind of time warp - we've gone back to Saul and David!

Yes, 1 and 2 Chronicles are a recap of the events of 2 Samuel and 1 and 2 Kings. Some passages are pretty much word-for-word repeats, others are summaries or add new material.

I always find it a little frustrating to get to this point. 1 and 2 Kings are definitely not my favourite books of the Bible and as soon as you finish them you have it all again.

But as I've said before, the least popular bits of the Bible are often the bits that you most benefit from paying attention to. So let's see what we find...

One of the most frequent questions I got asked when I started Bible Summary was what was I going to do with all the lists of names.

Well, here I am right in the middle of them, and yes they are some of the trickiest chapters I've done. (Which is only partly due to the fact that my own genealogy has recently gained a generation and I'm consequently a little sleep-deprived.)

The first challenge is actually reading the chapter! It's amazing how easy it is to switch off when trying to read all the begetting. I frequently find that my mind has wandered and I'm thinking about something completely different.

The second challenge is in understanding what's going on. You'd think it would be pretty straightforward - some guy, his son, his son, his son - but these chapters are full of family branches. It can be incredibly hard to follow all the relations. I've spent more time in commentaries as I've read these chapters than almost any so far.

Then finally there's the business of summarising. I've obviously got to miss people out and it's a lot harder with these chapters to decide what to emphasise. I've been trying to understand the point of each genealogy and highlight that. (For example: 1 Chronicles 1 takes us from Adam to Israel; 1 Chronicles 2 shows us Judah's line to David.)

These are never going to be anyone's favourite chapters (Jabez and his best-selling prayer notwithstanding) but this has always been an exercise in engaging more deeply and deliberately with what's there in the Bible. The commitment to write a summary probably pays off most with difficult and unpopular chapters.