Pastor's Corner

Rev. Mantu Joshi

What is Godly Play? I kept asking myself this question as seven of us from our church took an entire weekend and over 20 hours to become certified Godly Play teachers. Most of us would answer with something like-don’t our children do that for Sunday School? Of course those who teach Godly Play know that defining Godly Play is difficult because, by its very nature, Godly Play is not something you can quantify. We might mention that it is an off-shoot of the Montessori method, or that the method’s champion, Jerome W. Berryman, had a knack for teaching children. It is certainly educational, but not in dates and facts. Godly play is at its heart an invitation to wonder on, and even at moments discover for ourselves, the living God.

Godly Play is really all about encountering the mystery of God. This happens through sacred story telling. The mystery reveals itself differently for each person and can change each time they hear it. I was particularly moved when we heard the parable of The Pearl of Great Price. To be honest, at first I was not so impressed. The felt on the floor was not so different than my Sunday School growing up. The magic (by that I mean mystery and awe for God’s love for us) happened when the storyteller simply told the story and then left those of us listening to wonder what it might mean. This is the wondering part of the story. We shared about what and who the pearl of great price may be and in the moment I had the feeling that God had come very near to us.

Isn’t that nearness to God what all of this Church life is about? We are not here to fill people’s heads with doctrine or to make our children carbon copies of ourselves, but to let the sacred stories and ways of the Church begin to form an experience of the living God. The Godly Play session is filled with a complete worship experience, paralleling the form we use in the sanctuary every week. In fact the experience has left me wondering how we might learn and connect Godly Play with our worship experience. How could we connect the experiences for our children? What about the symbols and colors that bring us into the mystery of God?

Godly Play is starting again on Rally Day, September 7^th. Does anybody else have goose bumps?