You’re thinking of signing up for this year’s 40acts challenge… But what do you have to expect from these 40 daily acts of generosity?

The acts are designed to be simple daily generous challenges which range in style from practical, roll-up-your-sleeves and get-your-hands-dirty tasks, to more relational, encouraging, world-focussed or reflective acts.  Each one is designed to be able to be performed in one day, although some you may want to take into several days – there are no hard and fast rules!  The acts have a traffic light system so you can choose which level of difficulty you want to take on each day, depending on how much time or other commitments you have – for more info on the traffic light system read this blog.

If you skip a day or miss out, there’s no need to worry.  If you don’t complete all 40 acts you haven’t failed – some people take inspiration from the acts into the weeks beyond 40acts, and some people grab hold of one act idea and run with it.  For example, in a previous year, one 40acts challenger, Kirsty, enjoyed and felt the impact from a thank-you letter writing challenge so much that she committed to writing letters to 40 different people to bless and encourage them.  The acts are there to be interpreted as you like.

We keep the acts under wraps until 6am each morning (UK time) when it’s sent out via email so that each day is a surprise, which adds to both the challenge and the joy of 40acts.  Everybody finds out the act of the day at the same time so we all start on a level playing field, and challengers interact with us all day on twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat, updating and inspiring each other with the different ways they’ve found to complete the challenge.

For those who want to take up the challenge but aren’t online, we have last year’s resource available as a downloadable pdf.

This year we have taken inspiration from chapter 12 of the book of Romans which speaks about offering up our bodies as a living sacrifice, ready to worship God in every part of how we live.  Our 40acts church resources (a set of sermon notes for church leaders and a complementary set of small group notes) work through this passage during the seven weeks of Lent and we have designed the acts to fit along a similar theme for each week.

We hope you will be challenged and inspired by the acts to be even more intentional with generosity this Lent!