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?