April fools

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Messy Church - an analogy

Proposed analogy:
Godly Play is the Mr Rogers to Messy Church's Sesame Street.

Yeah, ok, so I haven't watched children's television in America since about 1973. But I'm kind pleased with the analogy. So much so that I was tempted just to end the post here...
but I don't want to pit these two programs against each other.


Before I say anything else, I have to admit that I know even less about Messy Church than I do about recent developments in children's television. But it seems to me that comparing MC and GP is like comparing apples and oranges, because they start from very different premises. Crucially, Messy Church isn't a way of getting people to come to church on Sunday. Whereas one of my goals in using Godly Play is to prepare people to join traditional worship services. (Jerome Berryman would say that goal of GP is to teach the "Christian language system".)


I think this difference in goals and emphases explains one of the most obvious differences between MC and GP: MC places a huge emphasis on fun, while GP has a lot of emphasis on getting ready (calming down). The detractors say that MC is raising up children who expect church leaders to entertain them, and that GP is all about making children "sit down and shut up". I hope the detractors are wrong on both counts.


Although I'm interested in exploring their differences a bit more, and although I do have a lot of unease about certain aspects of MC, I hope that GP and MC don't have to be seen as rivals or opposing camps, just like I'm sure lots of folks my age grew up watching both Sesame Street and Mr Rogers. One summary said that Messy Church has five main characteristics:

• creative
• hospitable
• all-age
• Christ-centred
• worshipping

Although GP's worship tradition is more liturgical than MC's, I'd say these five characteristics are also true of good GP, which shows how much GP and MC have in common. 

photo source: Toughpigs

Let's acknowledge that we share the same goal of welcoming people (especially children) into a faith community.

Faces of Easter control card

We have no Godly Play this week, because on the last Sunday of each month we have an all-ages worship service. But thanks to stf, here's a photo from last week:

In the foreground you can see the control card I made for the Faces of Easter (Lenten) materials. This lesson takes us through various important episodes in Jesus' earthly life, from birth to resurrection. [I'm trying out the plaque designs by Juliana Heidenreich. For now, I have used the free sample cards - the German GP copyright notice is printed right on each picture. In the longer run, once I know which pictures I like best, I want to pay for them properly (or ... commission my own drawings?!?).]

Something that had really struck me back in Advent was how easy the Advent plaques were to arrange. If you get them mixed up, it's easy to put them in order again, because the first one shows only one candle, the second two candles, and so forth. The hardest part is remembering to put them back in the basket "backwards" (the first goes in last, so that it is on top for the next time).

But with the Faces of Easter, a person cannot put them in order without remembering which story each picture relates to, and knowing the order in which these episodes happened in Jesus' life. So I made a control card, which I hope will work a little like a puzzle. You can see at least a portion of each card, and should therefore be able to figure out which plaque needs to be on top of which.

I wonder how it works with store-bought Faces of Easter cards. Is it easy to put them back in order?

setting up the room

Before:

 After:

Every time we do Godly Play, I set up the room like this. It is not a chore! I usually find that setting up the room helps me to prepare for the session. And sometimes I have help - one week a child who had arrived early positioned the Holy Family for me. I always have help with putting the furniture away and collecting the materials to be taken home again. 

(For a more detailed description of what is in our room, see the chart in this post and/or explanations of our different "shelves" in this post.)

an extravagance of glitter glue

We're getting through a lot of glitter glue at Junior Church. Peter Privett advises that when stocking art materials, Check that there's material for both boys and girls. There's no hard and fast rule but girls tend to opt for drawing etc. - boys for activities that require manipulation. Too much glitter might send the wrong message. ("Designing and Building a Godly Play Classroom") Well, more than once in our classroom all the boys have chosen to work with glitter glue and all the girls have worked with clay. I'm pleased that our children do not feel trapped by gender stereotypes! 

But the thing that glitter glue has really got me thinking about is generosity and extravagance. I often say that one thing I love about Godly Play is its lavishness. We have all the time we need. I believe in the goal of providing beautiful and good quality materials, the goal that both story materials and art materials should be attractive, perhaps even the best your group can afford. So I'm surprised and unnerved by how anxious I get about our glitter glue expenditure. We seem to be getting through a LOT of glitter glue at Junior Church. 

I thought I understood the ideal of letting children explore for themselves what works and what doesn't work. But when one child started piling glitter-blob upon glitter-blob, and announced, I'm making a castle, I broke down. I said firmly that glitter glue wouldn't work for constructing upwards. If you want to make a castle, you need to use play-dough. If you want to use glitter paint, you need to make a painting. 

I keep re-playing that scene in my mind. I am struggling to find a good balance between freedom and limits, between instructing and letting the child explore. Perhaps I also need to remind myself that sometimes it's appropriate to break open a whole bottle of nard? (Mark 14:3, John 12:3)

Faces of Easter (Lent 2)

Today's lesson was about two episodes in the life of Jesus. After I'd showed pictures of them and talked about them, each member of the circle had the opportunity to choose anything in the room that would help us tell more about these parts of the story. It was also okay not to choose anything.

This is what we created together:

I say we, although I was one of the ones who chose not to add anything... except a song. While the materials were still out like this, I invited the circle to sing, Amen, Amen, Amen, Amen, Amen, and once they'd got the hang of the chorus I sang the first two verses, which are about exactly the scenes we were looking at: