Teaching Godly Play

How to Mentor the Spiritual Development of Children

Church Publishing

Contents

CHAPTER 1

WHY PLAY?

This book invites you to come and play. Why? Well for one thing, it's fun! Thepleasure of play is one of the big reasons we mammals have continued to playover the millennia. This self-reinforcing quality is only one of play'smystifying and delightful characteristics. We also play for the experience ofplay itself rather than any product the action might produce. During play thereis also deep concentration. Sometimes the action appears to speed up so timepasses quickly. Other times it slows down so movements appear to be in slowmotion when compared to ordinary time. It is also voluntary. You can't makepeople play. Play contributes to creativity, the learning of languages andpreparing for social roles. It seems to be everywhere because it can't beconfined to one kind of activity. Anything that can be done—even one's work—canbe done in a playful way.

Everyone knows what play is when they do it, but no one knows exactly how to putwhat they do into words. Perhaps the biggest reason for this is that play issignaled nonverbally. When people say, "Let's play," they may not mean it, butthe signal—a twinkle in the eye, a shrug of the shoulders, a grin or some otheraction—shows what is intended and can't be faked. What follows after the "playsignal" becomes set aside in a different framework than the everyday world andtherefore has a kind of "as-if" quality to it. For example when dogs are playfighting they know not to bite all the way down and that the "fight" can bebroken off at any time with both parties wagging their tails. In this sense playis considered by some to not be real. On the other hand, there is somethingabout play that is more real than ordinary experience. It helps us work out newsolutions to old problems and become re-created—which is very real.

Books about play are seldom playful. When I re-read the first edition of thisbook after about thirteen years I was surprised how dry it was. What Iremembered was not what had been written, but the fifteen years of fun it wasbased on. The classes with children and the workshops with adults were full oflaughter and playful give-and-take. Only a little of that got transferred to thewritten page. Still, this book is intended to be as light-hearted as it isserious. The way it all began still makes me laugh out loud after almost fiftyyears!

HOW THIS BOOK BEGAN

In 1960 I was in my middle year at Princeton Theological Seminary. Something wasmissing in my theological training. What was it? Slowly I began to realize thatchildren played no part in our theological studies. Hadn't Jesus said that weneed to welcome children to know God and that we need to become like them toenter the Kingdom? My own childhood had included experiences of God's presence,which set me on the path to Princeton. How could children be left out after Igot there?

This vague sense of something missing snapped sharply into focus when it wastime to take the required religious education class. At last, children werementioned! Alas, they were still a side issue. Adult education and educationaltheory took center stage. Children were treated like empty vessels that neededentertaining and filling up. The emphasis was on getting the doctrine right andthen convincing children to believe it. No one seemed to think children mightalready know God and that what they needed was an appropriate language toconstruct their own personal meaning about that reality.

At the time I could only intuit this and could neither articulate nor advocatefor it. All I could do was disrupt the class with my frustration and apparentlyI did that very well. Finally, I was ordered by the Dean to take a tutorial withthe professor rather than continuing to ruin the class. The professor who madethis creative suggestion to the Dean was D. Campbell Wyckoff. I wrote a paperfor him about what I thought religious education ought to be like and that wasthe beginning of Godly Play, even though I had no idea then. It was stilldecades away from having a name.

My personal experience as I was growing up suggested that children's knowledgeof God was undifferentiated and mostly nonverbal. That is what most adultmystics have said across the centuries when they tried to explain their ownmature experience of God. If this is true, then what children need is not to befilled with facts or to be entertained but to learn the art of how to use thebest language possible to identify their experience of God. Intuitively, playseemed to me to be the way to help children learn and practice this language andto name and express what they already know.

When children learn the language of mathematics they have already experiencedadding and subtracting as they pile things up or take things away in their play.The language of mathematics helps them become more conscious of what they aredoing and it gives them the power to be more flexible and orderly about suchactions. Why wouldn't religious language work in the same way?

The problem is that religious language is so different from the language ofscience, which is the language most emphasized in schools today. Instead of thefunctions of adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing, the Christianlanguage system has the functions of identity making (sacred story), stimulatingexploration of Christian meaning (parable), making redemption available to thecommunity (liturgical action) and opening the way to experience the presence ofthe mystery of God directly (contemplative silence).

My question in 1960 was "How can one teach such a strange language?" It took adecade of working in churches and schools before a method was discovered. TheMontessori method was chosen as the best way to connect the child's intuition ofGod with the language of the church. Children could be encouraged to constructtheir own meaning about God by the playful interaction of their experience withChristian language, I thought.

Our family moved to Italy for a year, 1971-1972, so I could study MariaMontessori's educational approach at the Center for Advanced Montessori Studiesin Bergamo. As I gained experience with Montessori education in the years thatfollowed, I also realized that Montessori was way ahead of me. She and herfollowers, especially Sofia Cavalletti in Rome, had already developed a kind ofMontessori religious education. That made my task easier—in theory—but it stilltook another twenty years of experience before the first edition of TeachingGodly Play was published. It took another fifteen years after that for thissecond edition to be ready.

I work slowly, quietly and carefully, but surprises come hopping like littlerabbits into view all the time. One of the biggest surprises about this book isthat almost nothing fundamental has changed since the first edition. The lastfifteen years have confirmed what the first twenty years discovered.

This invitation to come and play is based on what Jesus said about welcomingchildren and becoming like them. This is a way to know God and to enter God'sKingdom. One of the most interesting things about accepting this invitation isthat the memories of your own childhood will become more available to you as youwork with children. This will provide a deeper foundation for Jesus' words inyour own experience as well as help you gain insight into the community ofchildren you work with.

This invitation and its consequences is why I would like to tell some storiesabout how the bridge was built during my childhood between the personal andundifferentiated experience of God's presence and the language of the church.

GOD AND THE "CHURCH GOD"

I grew up in a small town on the prairie of Southwestern Kansas. I could see thePresbyterian Church from my bedroom window. It was just a block away, across thestreet from my grandmother's house. Of course, many memories of childhood getreinterpreted as the years go by, but there are also some events that are sosignificant that they require continuing interpretation. I would like to tellyou about four such moments in my life from about age 5 through age 10.

When I was about five years old I was staying with my grandmother. Mygrandfather was away so when it came time to go to sleep I climbed up onto hisbed and snuggled in. My grandmother was in her bed only a few feet away. Sheturned out the light. I could hear the clock ticking. Suddenly the dark crowdedin on me and I cried out, "I don't want to die!" I don't remember what mygrandmother said, but I do remember her presence in the dark as she helped meget in touch with a larger presence, a Power without a name that I could feel.The safety of this overarching Power helped me relax. I stretched, yawned andwent to sleep.

My earliest memory of church was about the same time. I know I was not very bigbecause going up and down the stairs to the basement education rooms in ourchurch was very difficult. I really had to stretch my legs up and down and hangon to someone's hand to manage the steps. They made a hollow, booming sound,which troubled me at first, as I clomped up and down.

In the basement there was an enormous room. Grown-ups talked and children triedto be quiet, sitting on little wooden chairs in a row. High on the wall to myleft was a blue, shiny ribbon with baby cradles pinned to it. When we went to asmaller room there was a low table. We sat on one side and a grown-up sat on theother side. I don't remember how we got there or found our way back to the bigroom, but there were only a few children in the smaller room. I remembertouching the table and watching the grown-up on the other side. She talked. Idon't remember what she said, but I must have been listening because one SundayI proudly announced to my parents, "He eats carrots for me." The laughterassociated the memory with a mild sense of shame. I had said something wrong,but I still thought I was right.

My parents explained that I should have said, "He careth for me." That was the"memory verse" for the day. The meaning I had constructed about carrots,however, fit much better with the rest of what the teacher had said about Jesus.This is because one of the hardest things I had to do at meals was to eatcarrots, which I hated. If Jesus would eat carrots for me I was grateful, but Ihad no way to explain or defend my theology of redemption at that time. Still, Iwas proud of the meaning I had created. It was mine and it made sense to me.After this, however, I began to lose interest in what was said in church, but Istill enjoyed going there with my family. There was something special aboutgetting dressed up, the singing, the beautiful windows, the wooden arches andall the people—including my grandparents and cousins.

One Easter, when I was about six, I remember standing in the family gardenbehind my grandmother's house out by the barn after church. My parents,grandmother, aunts, uncles, cousins, and perhaps others were all gathered therehappily talking and looking at the little rows of green sprouts coming upthrough the warming Kansas soil. I can still smell the earth, sense the stirringof the warm spring winds, and feel the new growth in the air. An intuitionnudged me, barely able to be worked out in words. So this is what all the"Easter" fuss is about! A fragile connection began to form between the God ofPower I cried out to in the dark and the social experience of going to church. Inever mentioned what I had discovered about Easter, however. It was toocomplicated and I wasn't sure anyone would be interested. I also didn't want tolook ridiculous again.

When I was about ten years old something happened that completed the tentativebridge between the God of Power and the Church God. Two friends and I had beenvery disruptive in the choir during church. The choirmaster brought us all backinto the choir loft after church and sat us down. He stood right in front of meand my two friends and said something like, "You boys don't have any right todestroy church for me or anyone else. I come here to find God in the scripturesand in the singing. (It was only years later that I realized he had notmentioned the preaching!) Your chatter and disrespect destroyed my worship thismorning. You owe me an apology."

I may not have remembered the words exactly, but what I am sure about was thatthere were the traces of tears on his cheeks. I had never realized until thenthat what went on in church actually mattered that much. I thought it was onlysomething that one did. I liked being there and having my Dad unwrap a mint andslip it to me without anyone seeing, but church was basically a kind ofperformance one dressed up for. The connection between the God of Power and theChurch God now was more conscious, but it was still perplexing. The largerquestions it raised probably played a large part in bringing me to Princeton tostudy theology and then to work out the theory and practice of Godly Play.

In 1977, some 30 years after the confrontation in the choir loft, I read EdwardRobinson's Original Vision. It was based on a large study of children'sexperiences of God, as described by adults looking back on their childhoods. Oneof the chapters in his book was called "Church God." That gave me the languageto better understand the gap between the God of Power and the Church God that Ihad experienced. Robinson and I began to correspond. One of the things we talkedabout was the double meaning he claimed for the word "self-authenticating."

One meaning for "self-authenticating" refers to an experience that presentsitself in a significant way that "brings with it an assurance of its ownreality." The other meaning for "self-authentication" was, as he wrote, "theselfhood of the person to whom the experience comes." Both the presenting andconfirming aspects of a significant experience are mysterious, elusive andimportant. But, what Robinson was adamant about was that religion "may supportthis emergent self-awareness: it cannot dictate to it. No Church God canultimately be acknowledged unless ... acceptable to this inner authority."Somehow the God of Power and the social Church God both needed self-authenticationto be integrated. Play, it seemed to me, was the key to helpingthis get done.

THE CHURCH GOD AND PLAY

Every Godly Play class seems contained in its own environment, but that is nottrue. The children bring their experience of the world through the door whenthey enter and the spirit of play expands much farther beyond the class thanmight be suspected. Christians value work and responsibility, so the theme ofplay in theology has not been a major one. There has been, however, a strongundercurrent of respect for play and this should not be too surprising becauseplay is so fundamental to what it means to be human. To acknowledge the strengthof this undercurrent we need to spend a few moments describing it.

Play was formally identified as a fundamental human quality by the distinguishedDutch historian, Johan Huizinga. He called our species Homo Ludens (playingcreatures) to contrast with the views much debated at the time, that we arefundamentally Homo Sapiens (thinking creatures) or, perhaps, Homo Faber (toolmakers). His book, Homo Ludens, originally published in Dutch in 1938, not onlyargued that play is a basic activity for human beings, but that culture is play.In the 1955 English translation he wrote, "it was not my object to define theplace of play among all the other manifestations of culture, but rather toascertain how far culture itself bears the character of play." If play isfundamental to our nature and culture, as Huizinga thought, then it is nosurprise that the community of children in Godly Play, which prefigures byanalogy the community of the church, needs to be a playing culture to beauthentic.

The idea of God being at play in the community of children should also be nosurprise. The idea that God is at play flowed into Christianity from both Jewishand Greek sources and is associated with the creativity of God and God'screatures. The Torah begins with the idea that we are created in the image ofthe Creator and that this is good (Genesis 1: 26). When Wisdom, herself, isinterpreted as being a child playing delightfully before God (Proverbs 8: 30)then our creative nature and our playful wisdom are bound together. When theprophet Zechariah (8: 5) tells us that when God dwells in Jerusalem old men andwomen shall again sit in the streets taking their ease and that the "city shallbe full of boys and girls playing in its streets" then we know that play is partof the ideal community.
(Continues...)Excerpted from Teaching Godly Play by Jerome W. Berryman, Brian C. Dumm, Leslie Dunlap. Copyright © 2009 Morehouse Education Resources. Excerpted by permission of Church Publishing.
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