The complete history of God’s dealings with humans, from the creation through the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, to the end times as prophesied in the Revelation of John, is told in The Story: the Bible as One Continuing Story of God and His People. The content of the book is nearly all selected directly from the text of the New International Version of the Bible, but it also includes linking portions to explain omitted events and to maintain the flow.
The book is divided into 31 chapters, and one way in which it can be used is as a 31-week teaching series for churches, focusing on one chapter per week. This is how my church has used it (with breaks for Christmas and other special events). Weekly sermons have focused on one part of the week’s chapter, and supplementary materials relating to the same chapter have been available for small groups meeting during the following week.
In my opinion the book has identified and addresses a key weakness for many contemporary churchgoers: a lack of understanding of the complete message of the Bible. However, I am not sure that a condensed 500-page version is really any more likely to solve the lack-of-Bible-reading problem than a full 2000-page version. It seemed to me that at the start of the church teaching series most people made an effort to read the weekly chapters, but the participation rate fell off as the series progressed. The problem seems to be not that the “real” Bible is too challenging but that many people just do not read.
On the other hand, I thought that the 31-week overview of the whole story of the Bible as given by the sermon series did help most people to develop a greater understanding of the big picture. A lot of Bible was crammed into each chapter, so the weekly sermons tended to focus on one aspect of each chapter rather than on the whole, but the cumulative effect of the 31 weeks still gave a reasonable overview. I would definitely recommend this resource to other churches.