Contributor Agreement

What you’re agreeing to

When you share a story with Today’s God Story — by phone, voice recording, email, text, or our website — you’re entrusting us with something personal. This agreement explains how we honor that trust. By submitting, you agree to the terms below. If you disagree with any of them, please don’t submit.

1. You're sharing your own story

You confirm that the story you’re sharing is your own — either something that happened to you directly, or something you witnessed and have permission to tell. If your story names other people, you take responsibility for any details about them that you choose to include.

2. You're giving us permission to use it

You give Today’s God Story a non-exclusive, royalty-free, perpetual license to use, edit, translate, summarize, transcribe, and share your story in the ways described below. You retain full ownership of your story; you can keep telling it however else you like, including elsewhere.

The ways we may share your story include:

• This website’s public archive at todaysgodstory.com
• Our email newsletter
• Our social media accounts
• Our podcast or audio compilations
• Printed compilations or books
• Other ministry channels we may develop in the future

3. Editorial discretion

We may edit your story for clarity, length, anonymity, or readability. AI tools we host ourselves may assist with transcription, summarization, and tagging, but every published version is reviewed by a human (Judy or Ryan) before going out. If we materially change the meaning of your story, we will contact you first.

4. Consent and anonymity

At submission time you choose whether your name and location can be displayed alongside your story:

• Consent to publish with attribution: we may use your first name and city/state (e.g. “Margaret, Waco, TX”) alongside the story. We won’t publish your last name, phone number, or email under any circumstance.
• Anonymous:if you don’t consent, we still keep your contact details on file (so we can follow up), but the published version omits your name and location and may further anonymize identifying details.

You can change your consent decision at any time by emailing stories@todaysgodstory.com.

5. What we won't do

• We won’t sell your story or your contact information.
• We won’t use your story in commercial advertising for products outside this ministry.
• We won’t feed your story into AI training datasets — ours or anyone else’s. The AI tools we use process your story to summarize and tag it, not to train models.
• We won’t publish your story if you withdraw consent — though if it’s already in print or in a podcast episode, we can’t recall it from people who already received it.

6. Pulling a story down

If you change your mind after a story has been published, email stories@todaysgodstory.com. We will remove it from this website, the archive, and any active newsletter sequences within 14 days. We’ll do our best with external channels (social media, podcast platforms) but cannot guarantee removal from places we don’t directly control.

7. No payment, no obligation

Sharing your story is a gift to the ministry. We do not pay contributors. You are under no obligation to share more stories or to participate in any follow-up unless you choose to. Likewise, we are under no obligation to publish any particular submission — some stories may sit in the archive unpublished, at our discretion.

8. Limits on what we can publish

We reserve the right to decline to publish a story for any reason, including (but not limited to):

• It identifies a third party without their consent.
• It contains accusations we cannot verify.
• It contains content that would be unsafe to publish (e.g. specifics about an ongoing abusive situation).
• It promotes a product, service, or partisan political position.
• It conflicts with the ministry’s purpose, in our judgment.

If we decline to publish, your story remains in our records (so we can still pray with you and follow up if you asked us to) but does not become public.

9. Children

We don’t accept submissions from individuals under 13. Submissions from individuals between 13 and 17 require a parent or guardian to confirm consent at the time of submission.

10. Governing law

This agreement is governed by the laws of the State of Texas, United States, without regard to its conflict-of-laws principles. Any dispute that cannot be resolved between us in good faith will be handled by the courts of McLennan County, Texas.

Contact

Today’s God Story
Operated by Ryan and Judy Patterson
Email: stories@todaysgodstory.com