In your church

Run WYS

In your church

Are you looking to build a stronger sense of community and connectedness in your church or ministry in an increasingly disconnected world? Are you keen to improve relationships and bridge divides in your congregation but don’t have a great deal of time or resources to do so? You’ve come to the right place!

What’s Your Story? Church is a multimedia toolkit with various resources for building relationships both within your church, as well as beyond your church. It can be used to strengthen relationships in your small group, youth group, ministry teams, broader congregation or Christian organisation.

What’s Your Story? Church is:

A story-sharing initiative for your church, small group, youth group, ministry or family.
A multimedia tool that can be used to strengthen relationships between members within your church, and beyond.
A means to help you build understanding, empathy and stronger sense of community in your church, ministry or small group.
A first step to loving your neighbour through story-sharing.
An online resource centre supporting you to run WYS.

What's Your Story? Church is a way of doing life more relationally. It’s a way of relating to, ministering to and loving our neighbours better, through the sharing of our stories. Just as Jesus did.

Read testimonies

How to run WYS in your church

If you’d like to adopt What’s Your Story? across your entire congregation, we suggest this process:

What to do	How
1. Get endorsement from leadership	Show them the What’s your Story? toolkit, church promo video or general promo video.
2. Sign up on the new WYS Church online resource centre	Sign up and create your profile to access all the free resources you need.
3. Download your church leader’s WYS information brochure	Find the WYS information brochure here.
4. Launch WYS to your congregation	Launch a WYS sermon series where the priest or pastor shares her/his story. Show the promo video and the film Beyond the River to the entire congregation.
5. Roll out WYS in your small groups	This four-session resource series, WYS for Christian Small Groups, can be found in our Courses section on the site.
6. Roll out WYS in your youth group	Story-sharing for Church Youth Groups can be found on our Courses page.
7. Let us know how the first phase went and how we can support you to go further	Do a monitoring and evaluation research project, facilitated by Heartlines. See case studies of other churches who’ve done WYS.
8. Host story-based events and make story-sharing part of your church culture	Find ideas in the mini resource, Creating a Culture of Story-sharing.

Run a WYS module in your ministry

This option is for those who only want to roll out WYS in a specific context, such as in your small group or youth group, or by using Beyond the River to introduce WYS. You can do this by signing up to view our range of resources, and choosing the best options for your context.

Our resources are set up like course modules that can either be used on their own, as a once-off process; or as one part of a series, over a period of time. Feel free to roll out one resource module, or several of the resources listed below.

Don’t forget to sign up and create your profile in order to access all of the free resources, materials and videos.