For two years now I’ve been playing with these gold-wrapped boxes full of felt and crudely laminated paper figures. I sit in a circle with preschoolers and we skip our way through a cat-and-mouse liturgy of wondering and storytelling. Some of the time we use a 2” x 4” wooden sandbox. We fill it with unpainted wooden figures and march them through the Hebrew Bible narratives of exodus, law-giving, worship, exile, and return. A few rocks and some yarn are our only tools.
This is Young Children and Worship, product of the late Sonja Stewart in collaboration with Jerome Berryman. Berryman is an Episcopal Priest responsible for Godly Play, a Montessori-based program of children’s faith formation modeled after Sophia Cavalletti’s Catechesis of The Good Shepherd. Got that? Montessori, Cavaletti, Berryman, Stewart.
I spent several hours last weekend receiving the Godly Play core training. Come fall, our church’s Children and Family Ministries Director and I will pilot a weeks-long experiment in establishing Godly Play as our primary childrens’ Sunday School curriculum. I was in love with the method before the training; now I’m marrying it.
Godly Play is a multimedia experience. Only, in contrast to traditional Protestant childrens’ curriculum, books are not among the media of instruction. Not even the Bible. That’s because, while the content is thoroughly “Biblical”– bible stories make up the lion’s share of what’s presented–those wooden figures and felt underlays replace the text. The storyteller never looks at a book; the whole story is presented from memory, and the manipulation of the figures equals the storyteller’s words in importance. It’s magic (check out the demonstration below).
Are any of you using this? What’s your experience been like? Are you married to it? Flirting with it? Has anyone divorced it?
YoRocko! 
So happy to hear that you are now married to Godly Play. I am still totally in love with it, although we have left it for a time (hopefully not forever) because of lack of attendance. I do think that the few kids whose parents brought them (usually me and the greeter of that day, maybe one other family) did gain a lot, and I do still use many of the stories during our Sacred Space time in worship. One thing that I was often frustrated about was how during response time the children would often paint (watercolor was the most popular response medium in our room) things like the Easter Bunny. I didn’t want to guide them TOO much but often felt that maybe they were not using that time to really think about the story, and that kind of frustrated me. My favorite thing was our wondering time, because, unlike in worship when I have a pastor breathing down my neck not to take too long, we wondered for a long time and that’s when I really felt that they connected to the story. Our wonderings often took us to the Bible because they wanted to know exactly what the Bible said, how it was described there. Anyway, I’m excited for you, Rocky – I’m sure you’re a natural storyteller.