The Philadelphia Inquirer reports what happened when a church rector challenged his congregation to read the Bible cover to cover in one year.

It may be the best-selling book of all time, but its battles, bloodletting, and “begats,” its many laws, rituals, and tribes, and those chewy names like Oholiab and Eliphelehu and “Joshbekashah son of Heman” don’t make for easy reading.

Yet when Rev. Marek Zabriskie, the rector of St. Thomas Episcopal Church in Whitemarsh, PA asked his congregation to join together to read the Bible in its entirety, “the response surprised him,” writes the paper.

“It’s taken on a life of its own,” he said last week. More than 150 of his 1,300 congregants, and 85 others, have turned his “Bible Challenge” into a far-flung community of readers, Zabriskie said. The project has also taught him new ways to conceive of “church” in the electronic age.

“It’s not going to be easy,” Zabriskie, a self-described “theological centrist,” had cautioned prospective readers last winter. Like most mainline Protestants, few had ever sat down with the parts he calls “boring and gruesome and strange” that almost never make it into liturgies or homilies.