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We wanted to help the adults have a way to speak the same language as children in worship and the children to speak the same language as adults in worship, and we discovered that that language was play.

From the 91����, you are listening to Public 91���� and the Christian Life: a podcast that amplifies people and stories that share wisdom and wonder about Christian public worship. I’m Kristen Verhulst, producer and host. In this season’s episodes, I share conversations with project directors who participated in the institute’s Vital 91����, Vital Preaching Grants program, an initiative which provides funds and encouragement for worshiping communities across Canada and the United States, in order to design and engage year-long projects that connect public worship with Christian discipleship and faith formation.

In this episode I talk with Katie Callaway of Christian Temple Christian Church, in Catonsville, Maryland, where she directed a project that explored deepening her congregation’s understanding of worship by experimenting with godly play.

Welcome to the podcast.

Well, hi, Katie. It's great to have you on the podcast today. And I wonder if you can tell us here about this grant project you and your congregation embarked on.

Yeah, thanks, thanks again for having me. So we embarked upon a grant project, and we kind of called it our “experiment in play.” And so it was actually really interesting. My husband and I are copastors at Christian Temple Christian Church. It's a Disciples of Christ congregation here in the Baltimore area, and we were relatively new to the congregation when we began this project, and so really it kind of was a nice little experiment that allowed us to get to know the congregation even better. That was kind of a nice little peripheral bonus of this project, but we set out to try to broaden our conception of worship, because what we noticed in our ministries is that what happens in the spiritual formation realm of life affects what happens in worship, and vice versa.

My copastor spouse and I were both products of churches and ministries throughout our lives, both that we participated in and led, that were very age segregated. So you only learn and you're only formed in small groups that are your age peers, and we felt like that was really hamstringing the church because it was creating not necessarily divisions, but it was inhibiting us from really being a community together.

And in my tradition, in the Disciples of Christ, we come together every Sunday and take communion, and to me that is the climax of our worship, and I was feeling very strongly and kind of heard the rumblings of this throughout the congregation that “Yeah, when we came around the table, this is this great experience,” and it almost felt as though the age groups and the generations in our congregations didn't know each other, which I felt inhibited our worship together.

So we wanted to help the adults—and really it was an adults/children kind of conversation—we wanted to help the adults have a way to speak the same language as children in worship and the children to speak the same language as adults in worship, and we discovered that that language was play. So that's where we leaned into that as the crux of our project and experiment, and we had the most fun with it.

Kind of a little side benefit of this was that post-COVID, I think people just wanted to be with each other and have fun together. And so this gave us another excuse to just have fun together.

For someone listening who may not know this term “Godly play” or just playfulness in worship, could you just kind of unpack that a little bit more for someone who's listening where this is a new concept?

Yeah. . . . When we set out to do this project, we had to come up with a definition of play that was going to allow us to communicate this to the congregation too. So I think a lot of people when they hear the terms “play” and “playfulness,” they think play structures and primary-color plastic playgrounds. But we wanted to go beyond that. And so when we started doing some reflections as a congregation and as a staff as we were preparing our proposal, what we learned is that play is so much more than a structure or a playground or any of that. It is anything that elicits wonder and imagination and curiosity. So when we think about play like that, yeah, worship is playful, because the very essence of what we're doing as worship leaders is trying to elicit wonder, curiosity, and imagination.

We wanted to capture that as our working definition, so what we did throughout the project is different experimentations with each element of play, so experimentations with imagination and curiosity and wonder. And it turned out to be a really interesting thing. And we kind of funneled that down to using Godly play, which is this Montessori-based, learner-led, exploratory spiritual formation tool. I don't even want to call it a curriculum, because it's so much more than that. But it's this tool that we used to elicit the wonder, curiosity, and imagination in all of us. Typically Godly play is used in little ones, but we used it for everybody, and it was a really neat thing.

That makes me think right away of a liturgy we've used in the past at our worship conference, where the child is at the table and asks the adult, “Why do we come to the table?” or “What are we doing here?” And that's just that spirit of wonder and curiosity. And how beautiful that that can bridge a generational span!

Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah, and I think in the busyness of the world I think we've been conditioned to sequester our wonder and curiosity and imagination—like, we can have it here in this space, but not over here. And I think when churches run the risk of doing that, of sequestering the wonder, curiosity, imagination, just to the children's area, then we run the risk of taking the breath out of our church.

Yeah. And I wonder, too, if you could just talk a little bit about how I think people might think of play and curiosity and maybe equate that with spontaneity. But I think what happened a little bit in your project is you realized it had to be thought out and very intentional. So how do you balance not overdoing it with the planning, and yet not underdoing it?

When I figure that out, maybe there will be a prize at the end of that tunnel, because I haven't figured that out, to be honest, because, you know, you said the magic word. Playfulness has to be intentional because we are so conditioned to sequester it, to put it over there, and so we had to be very intentional about it. We even scheduled—and this was in our proposal—we even scheduled a yearly trip for the congregation to the beach where there is no programming. And we have to be protective over that. So again, it's this intentionality about planning opportunities where we can explore our imagination. It's—in Godly play we talk about: There are four teachers in the room, four different types of stories. There's the core stories, which take place in the desert, and they're the 3-D stories that we know of: Abraham and the great family, and Noah and the ark, and all of the great stories. So there are the core stories; the parables; there are liturgical action stories, which is like baptism and those sorts of ritualistic stories. But the fourth story is the most important and the most intentional, but the most difficult to remember that it's there. But it's the story of silence. So it's in that silence, it's in making that space, being very intentional about making the space for playfulness, that is when wonder and curiosity and imagination are allowed to come in.

I think about (how) Fred Rogers played a big role in in this project for us. I think about Fred Rogers talking about how boredom is the thing that births creativity. And my child gets really tired of me telling her that when she's bored. But there's something to that. It's in the negative spaces in the spaces we create that we intentionally shape where playfulness can come in. So it takes intentionality to create the space and the container for playfulness, and then it takes self-control to not have to put your fingers in it and manipulate things in order to get the outcome that you want.

Yeah. And one of those containers or rhythms is the Christian year. So I wonder if you could talk about how the Christian year factored in or came alongside of your Godly play project.

Yeah. So we wanted to really experiment most intentionally in Advent and Lent. So during Advent, it was actually really fun. We had the children prior to Advent create big Godly play cards for worship, and in the midst of all of this project we renamed the “Children's Moment” to “A Story for All Ages,” because it really is. I mean, there are plenty of adults who get more out of that than my sermon. During the Story for All Ages, we used Godly play storytelling—not only the narrative, but also the tactics of the pacing and leaving space for the wonder. We did that all during Advent. And then we had some other elements. We have a live Nativity that we have the weekend before Christmas, typically. So we set up the marketplace as kind of a threshold for people to walk through prior to coming into the worship service.

And so all of this that we did to kind of prepare that space in the sanctuary for our worship during Advent really, I think, did a good job of helping people understand Oh, wait a second. This space is different. This space has been intentionally crafted. And then wonder about that. And so it naturally kind of brought them into a space of curiosity. Why is this different? We did a similar thing with the season of Lent. We didn't use the Godly play stuff during Lent. We did something totally off the wall. We used—and we didn't plan this; this had to be kind of a more spontaneous thing for us. We came across an opportunity to host Rob Bell on a podcast that my co-pastor spouse and I do on Tuesday nights. And Rob Bell had just put out a novel, his first novel. And it was a bizarre novel called Where'd You Park Your Spaceship? And so we had this kind of cosmic focus during Lent.

So we stepped into the focus on imagination by using this book, this novel that had no—I mean, never in any of the pages was God mentioned, but it was deeply spiritual. So we read it as a congregation, and in the worship space we shaped our homily—we have a two-homily setup during worship; my co-pastor spouse does one, and I do another. So we switched off: one speaking to the lectionary, and one linking it to this weird book that was, might I say, excellent!

But what that did is it created this kind of neck-craning moment, like, what in the world is this? Oh, that's what this is. And so really, it's kind of experimenting for us during those holy seasons where people are already a little bit knocked out of their regular rhythms, which we need to be, and then experimenting just to knock them out of those regular rhythms just a little bit more.

When you look back over the whole year of the grant project, what were those unexpected moments—surprising, maybe even a few little hiccups but [which] really turned out to be key learning times as you look back over the entire project?

That's a great question. I think one of the big ones for me that I was surprised came up was the idea of child liberation.

It arose early and often throughout our year together doing this project.

And so we started asking the question What does it mean? If we're going to be intentional to include children, inclusion is not enough, because we were realizing that when we were including them, we were just kind of baptizing our way of being in the sanctuary and standardizing that. And so, in order to be “good,” you've got to be like us. You've got to be quiet and reverent, etc., etc.

And so what we learned kind of by accident, is realizing intergenerational spiritual formation is difficult. What we learned is that inclusion is not enough. Inclusion means that we welcome you on our terms, and liberation is we welcome you on your terms. And so we realized we have a long way to go in welcoming children, particularly, on their terms, and that that true intergenerational growth together is not going to happen until all generations who are coming together feel liberated and feel like agents coming together on their own, not because they have to be.

So how would you encourage someone listening to this who really does want that for their own worshiping community—truly formative, intergenerational community—but they feel kind of stuck? Is there something you might encourage them to do as a first step, or at least aim toward

That's a great question. We watched a lot of Fred Rogers together. And I laugh about that, but something happens that Fred gives over control and empowerment to the child and treats them like a human being, a seeker in their own right. And I think that we often forget that, that yes, this little child . . . I have a 7-year-old, and so she was at the heart of all of this experience. So yes, this little child is a 7-year-old. She is seven. And she has important questions that often I've seen in other situations brushed off as like, oh, she's just being a child. And so I think it's hard, because a lot of adults—and I'm sure you've heard this phrase thrown around, but I've heard a lot of people say “I just wasn't fed by that church.” I think we've got to claim what we're bringing as expectations to a gathering, because I don't think there's anything wrong with seeking out spiritual nourishment. I think that's great. But when that is the only thing you're looking for and the only thing you're seeking, I think that we can put blinders on to the other things, the things that seem peripheral, but are actually central that are going on around us. And so I think there's a measure of selflessness that being in community requires of us. But there's a measure of being in tune with the needs of others that has to happen in order for intergenerational anything to happen. We've got to set aside the pride that something is beneath us.

It was funny, my first interaction with Godly play—so in Godly play you've got the story side of it, but then there's this kind of empty space where the participants are invited to respond in some way. And typically it looks like doing some crafting or playing with the story, [or]we have in our Godly play room an embodied area where you can go do yoga, or you can do a finger labyrinth.

But when I was setting up a Godly playroom in a former church, I was talking with our Godly play facilitator and saying, “What should I have in the Godly play room for the adults to respond with?” And she looked at me, and she was like, “There is no difference between what we provide for adults and for children. There is nothing that is beneath an adult to use in this space. And so I think that same posture needs to be taken into any intergenerational opportunity that churches are presented with, because if we don't learn it at church, where will we learn it?

Right. Katie, it's been so great talking with you to hear a bit about your project at your community in Maryland. Thanks so much for joining me.

Thank you.

Learn more about the Vital 91����, Vital Preaching grants program through the 91���� at our website: worship.calvin.edu.