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While completing a grant on playfulness in worship, Sarah Travis began to see connections between play and trauma. 91ing God through embodied, imaginative, and story-based practices helps people and congregations stuck in trauma begin to move toward healing and new life.
Sarah Travis teaches ministry practice and faith formation at Knox College at the University of Toronto in Canada. She is an ordained minister in the Presbyterian Church in Canada. Her include and . In this edited conversation, Travis discusses what she learned while completing a 2023 Teacher-Scholar Grant on playful worship from 91’s Vital Preaching, Vital 91 Grants program.
My grant project began with the assumption that God is playful (Deus ludens) and has created a playful people (). God the Creator’s playfulness is evident in the natural world filled with vibrant colors, leaping dolphins, and curious kittens. Jesus, who enjoyed good food, wine, and company, invites us through his parables to imagine and live the kingdom of God into existence. The Holy Spirit reveals freedom and playfulness at the heart of God. The dance of relationships within the Trinity is inherently playful.
We are made in God’s image, called to worship with both our bodies and minds. 91 is communal, dynamic, embodied, and formative, allowing us to “play” with God. We symbolically die and rise again in baptism. In the Eucharist, we act out being “one body” despite division. Playful worship invites us to imagine, innovate, and immerse in a reality beyond our everyday lives, trusting that this imagined world is more real than we can see. 91 as playground lets us explore, express, pretend, try on, take a shot—then another. Always we begin again.
During a chapel service at Knox College, I brought in Lego bricks. Everyone had a chance to play with them while watching, listening, and otherwise participating in worship. Some played with Lego pieces, and others created the Bible story I was talking about. I led a focus group during the grant year. We talked a lot about creating a space where people felt safe enough to be playful or choose not to participate.
In a 91 Playground event for ministry leaders, we spread a table with dirt, brought in potted flowers, and gave each participant a fresh-cut peony. During the sermon, we invited people to reflect on being created, loved, and cared for. We invited them to come up, if they wished, to play in the dirt, plant flowers, or lay down their peony. This resulted in a moving and powerful symbol of God’s grace and playfulness. By the end, the table was bursting with life—plants, flowers, bread, and juice.
For me, so much of playfulness is about the words in metaphors and poetry or combined with music and imagery. Anything that leaves room for mystery can be playful. I’m an introvert who prefers preaching from a full manuscript. Yet a friend and I co-preached a sermon where he asked questions, and I answered. I was able to riff off words in the call to worship and an image on the screen to support what I was saying. The scripture reader, a teen, accidentally read the wrong passage. I rely on the Holy Spirit to write sermons, but that experience gave me a deeper experience of needing the Holy Spirt to pull all the pieces of worship together.
Play and trauma are connected in important ways. Traumatic wounds can prevent us from playing. But play can also help us heal as individuals and congregations. Our younger son died from liver disease on his third birthday. I remember how dreadful it was to sit in worship during that Advent because there was no space for our grief and trauma.
"Traumatic wounds can prevent us from playing. But play can also help us heal as individuals and congregations."
But there is such a thing as . My journey of healing has inspired all my writing projects. When I applied for this grant, I was the half-time pastor of Norval Presbyterian Church. This once-thriving church, 185 years old, had dwindled to an average of eight to twenty people in worship. We knew and grieved that the end was near. I began to wonder how a sense of playfulness might help small churches like mine to re-establish a sense of their own identity, worth, and purpose. After all, they loved being together.
We brought in a well-known jazz trio and invited local congregations and community members to a jazz worship service. It was amazing! We talked about how jazz is so sensory and how God is in the details and open spaces, how even cycles of beginning and ending can be playful.
This jazz metaphor helped them free themselves from needing to keep things going as they’d always been, even when it was no longer sustainable. It gave our congregation light and life to make a plan to distribute assets to other churches and parachurch organizations. An purchased the building, and now it’s full of life again. Our founders could never have anticipated what our playful God knew.
For my grant project and forthcoming book, I’m referring to trauma as a wound that persists, an unhealed manifestation of previous pain. Trauma can be historic or intergenerational, like racism or poverty. It can be an event, like a flood or car accident, or chronic, like living with food insecurity, domestic abuse, or in violent neighborhoods. It is not the magnitude of the trauma, but rather the way that an individual or community perceives it.
What differentiates trauma is a sense of being “stuck” in the moment so that the event repeats in our memory over and over. Great or small, these wounds persist and cause distress. So often with trauma we find ourselves in the messy middle between life and death. Life as we knew it has ended, and there is no going back, but a new life remains shadowy and hidden. It is in this space that we worship.
While telling the parable of the pearl of great price (from ) to a group of adults, my colleague Laura Alary used small items to show how the merchant sells everything to buy the pearl. She picked up a table and water jug and rolled up the felt rectangle representing a house. Seeing this, a woman in the group began to weep quietly. Afterward, she explained that the action reminded her of leaving everything behind as a child to move to Canada with her family.
The story had broken open a space for her to remember and wonder about the choice her parents had made. What had they lost? And gained? What had they valued most? What had they given up? What might her own life have been like had her parents made a different choice? What choices confronted her now? What did she value? How could she shape her own life differently in response? Playful worship helps us imagine and hope.
Yes, it’s titled The Body at Play: Trauma and the Promise of Playful 91, and I couldn’t have done it without co-author who wrote about half of the book. She’s a a New Testament scholar, and a librarian at Knox College. She helped me think through these topics and work on practical aspects such as designing liturgies. Laura researched successful playful worship ideas and came up with her own suggestions. We are currently looking for a publisher.
My part of the book explains how playful worship encourages transformation by inviting us to look at our lives from a new perspective and practice being receptive to what the Spirt may be doing in and among us. Transformation flows from authenticity. We need to know who we are, including our traumatized parts, before we can perceive what needs to change and heal. The next step is being open to what we might become.
Stories of transformation, reconciliation, healing, restoration, and resurrection give reassuring evidence that change is possible. Our book has liturgies, scripts, and directions for doing dramatic readings or playful Bible story reenactments. Sometimes these include manipulatives from or Children and 91. Laura gives dozens of examples of how to use specific children’s picture books in sermons.
She describes communal worship responses created by , a Presbyterian pastor in San Franciso, California. Theresa has used to weave together an eight-week series on the parables. For a series on how God calls us to live in community, Cho invited worshipers to help create a that became a banner, a communion table covering, and prayer scarves.
I’m always talking about embodiment to my students, even though I’m an introvert who lives in my head. It surprised me how quickly so many people responded to playful worship. For hesitant people like me, it creates a sense of safety when worship leaders describe the activity, make sure people know it’s fine not to participate, emphasize process over product, design collaborative projects, keep it simple, and let children lead the way.
Say you’re preaching on Genesis 1 or 2 or a scripture passage dealing with transformation, and you hand out pottery clay. Some people might decide to mold figures representing the Bible characters or event. Others will simply enjoy the tactile process of squeezing, rolling, or reforming the clay. Laura Alary’s many tactile examples in our book include a saltwater lament, where people write lament prayers on teardrop-shaped paper and sprinkle them with salted water. She also suggests giving everyone a length of knotted cord. Invite them to envision each knot as a problem, worry, or anxiety. In a time of silence, or with meditative music playing in the background, let people work at untying the knots, treating that tactile activity as a prayer to the Spirit to help smooth rough and tangled thoughts and feelings.
Think of what happens when the pastor tells a funny joke, or a child responds in a charming way to a question during the children’s time. When we laugh together as a congregation, we get just a hint of the kind of connection I am talking about. This kind of laughter causes you to look at your neighbor to see if they caught the joke and then exchange a knowing smile.
91 planners can design liturgies that promote a concept of “we-ness.” The more a congregation joins together to voice a call to worship, a unison prayer, or a hymn that sounds best when sung in harmony, the more we perceive ourselves as part of something. Standing together before a song or gathering around the communion table helps us experience worship as engaging in the same activity with the same goals. Adding playful worship elements does even more to open ourselves to one another and to the divine.
Scroll down to use or adapt dozens of choral Bible readings from 91. Read other . For more aspects of playful worship, she suggests reading:
