Sharing your stories of everyday faith.
We are all probably aware that being followers of Jesus is not confined to church activities. Most of us will pray or think about our faith at some point during the day. However, we can often miss out on hearing about people’s experiences by not asking each other or by making assumptions.
An ‘everyday faith slot’ is an ideal way to get to know people’s experiences of faith in the whole of life. By using a set of standard questions people of all ages and from a variety of contexts can share a little bit more about their Sunday to Saturday faith. It doesn’t only have to be about big things, but also about noticing God in the small things. LICC developed a practice called This Time Tomorrow to make sharing our stories a feature of our worship services. We have adapted this as part of our focus on Everyday Faith. As well as using this guide to sharing stories in person, you might also think about how you feature these stories of everyday faith on your ACNY Everyday Faith pages, you church website and on social media.
An ‘everyday faith slot’ aims to widen our understanding and imagination around being the church Sunday to Saturday because of this, the only hard rule is that this has to be about a role in everyday life – not a church role, project or task. It also works well if the person can draw on a Bible reading, prayer or other point of personal inspiration – though if people find this tricky you can skip this bit. Keeping this testimony focussed and not too long is a key part to their effectiveness. Having diverse voices is also really important and do also think about including children and young people.
Asking the right questions
To help steer an everyday faith slot you can arrange or ask the participant to film themselves on their phones (details on that below) with short answers to the following questions:
1. What’s your name and where do you live?
2. What do you love about your [context/job/role]?
3. What are some of the opportunities and the challenges?
4. How does your faith encourage you in these [thinking about Bible passages or prayers]?
You can film the questions one at a time or all in one go. You only need to give around 30 seconds on each question. If you are doing an everyday faith slot in person, remember to give people the questions in advance so that they can think through their responses. It is probably best to film people separately if you are going to use the slot online. It is also important to get a person’s permission before putting a film up on line. This is especially the case if someone is talking about a public or employed role. The challenge of talking about how our faith impacts the whole of life is one that an everyday faith slot seeks to tackle. Our experience is that people from a variety of roles and places of everyday faith value the opportunity to share how God blesses them in these places and how they seek to serve God wherever they are sent Sunday to Saturday.
Filming practicalities
Some practicalities to bear in mind for filming (for further information and advice an many aspects of filming and video use see our Learning Labs blogs)
• Please try to film in landscape (phone on its side)
• If filming solo, please place the phone on a surface – i.e. a shelf. If someone is filming you, then sitting is usually better for keeping a steady hand.
• Filming outdoors is tricky because of wind noise, so indoors is better.
• The microphones on most phones are good, but you do need to speak up to make sure you can be clearly heard.
• You should have you head and shoulders in the shot and try to have something interesting in the background – a picture or a set of shelves.
• Natural light from a window is the best lighting – the window should be behind the camera to give you the best light.
Putting an everyday faith slot into a service or online is an example of one of our eight small shifts that make a big difference in encouraging us all to find and follow God in everyday life. For more shifts and examples see our pages on the Church Support Hub.
