Chapel Hill Community Church in Waikato is collecting 1000 God Stories in 2019.
What’s a God Story? Those moments where we notice God at work in our lives, in big ways and small ways.
The Chapel Hill community has committed to simply asking together: ‘What is God doing in our lives?’ and being prayerfully expectant to see the ways he is active. "It’s about seeing God’s fingerprints in every area of life," says pastor Philip Renner.
The church has set up a special email address for the congregation to send in stories, and there’s a glass jar up the front that people can put in a bottle top to symbolically acknowledge a story, “not every God Story is widely shareable for privacy reasons,” says Philip, “so we want to make a safe space for sharing in a way that recognises who God is.”
For stories that can be shared widely, the weekly church email update contains a write up, and people have been noticing how helpful it is to sit and reflect on what God is doing:
“The discipline of recognising God at work in our lives has been really helpful, and the significance of sitting down to reflect and write up God Stories has been a blessing to everyone.”
The hope is that the momentum of sharing God Stories will build: “We’ve already seen the impact the act of sharing has had on people, and our prayer is that as we grow in sensitivity to seeing God’s Spirit at work in our lives, we’ll grow as a community of God’s people.”
