Facilitating Transformation Through Narrative Stories at Lakewood Church of Hope

Abstract

This project studied the impact of narrative stories on the life of certain church members at the Lakewood Church of Hope. This unconventional method of ministering to the Members and Guests of LCH to the Lakewood Heights Community will help improve the community's overall spiritual well-being. Through this research, this researcher intended to build stronger spiritual relationships in the Lakewood Heights Community.

Initial interviews were conducted with eight men as potential volunteers for this project. Of the eight men, six volunteered to participate in the study. Pre-interviews and post-interviews were recorded and coded to look for keywords and terms. The desired outcome is that the language and terms used at the beginning of the project interviews were expanded in the final interviews as a result of the weekly sessions. The meetings were observed and noted as the volunteers responded to the activities over the course of six weeks. I gave more attention to the language used over the six-week timeline. The results were coded the results and examined for changes throughout the project. In the post-interview, with the hope that they could teach their stories considering the story of redemption, they were asked what their findings or lessons learned in relation to their experiences from this project were.

This project opened a door for further research and maybe new methods. The men that chose to be a part of this series have done more than enough to make this a great experience. Many of them were rather reluctant to share their journey. While the men may not have been ready to dive deep into their emotions, they could have been more inspired to uncover things that they had forced themselves to bury with more opportunities of building trust with one another