Calling all clergy and religious educators!

Join us for a FREE online workshop "Being Church" In This Liminal Season: What's Next? with Sarah B. Drummond, PhD, Founding Dean of Andover Newton Seminary at Yale Divinity School.

There was Something About This Baby’s Death That Was Going to be Important.

A Reflection by the Rev. Cheryl V. Minor, Ph.D.

The Director of the Center for the Theology of Childhood for the Godly Play Foundation

“12 Tiny Things: Simple Ways to Live a More Intentional Life”

A Book Review by Joy Studer

Join us for a transformative workshop on "Trauma-Informed Children's Ministry: A Practical Guide to Reaching Hurting Kids." GO DEEPER on this topic and join us for a four-week online book study.

Please join us in welcoming two new members of the Godly Play team, Joy Studer and Raenelle Tauro who will serve as Co-Directors of the Everyday Godly Play grant.

The Godly Play Foundation is pleased to announce that we received a $1 million grant from Lilly Endowment Inc. from their Christian Parent and Caregiving Program. This grant will enable Godly Play to launch our newest project, Everyday Godly Play.

We are still basking in these seasons celebrating (with gifts, no less!) Jesus’ Incarnation in His teen mother’s womb, and Easter is threatening to thrust us to His Feet at the Crucifixion. Lent invites us to get ready: we pray, we cry, we lament. Yet I wonder, would we still mourn Jesus as a Black God-Man? The new Faces of Easter invites us to wonder together.

This post is adapted from Bird’s Substack newsletter Wiggles & Wonder. Bird has been teaching Godly Play in congregations along the East Coast for seven years. A recent transplant from Western Massachusetts, she lives with her wife and cats in Brighton, Mass.

Can you feel it? Day by day, we are moving towards Joy.

More than a decade ago, our family began incorporating the Advent Spiral into our time of preparation.

Godly Play Went Home: An Exploratory Study of the Experience of Godly Play in Homes During the Covid-19 Pandemic Through the Lens of Caregivers

Cheryl V. Minor & Hannah Sutton-Adams

Published in Religious Education online: 25 Jul 2022 https://doi.org/10.1080/00344087.2022.2101814

“Supported by engaging antidotes, research data, and interviews, this is a fundamental guide to how Godly Play can grow with our children on the developmental journey through middle and late childhood. The book calls us to create spaces for older children that give them permission to play, to wonder, to allow for mystery and big questions… Godly Play spaces.”

On Sunday January 16th 2022, I had the great honor of sharing The Dr King story with the kids at Hilliard United Methodist Church. Many of our children are seasoned Godly Play kids but this was a new story even for them.

Dear Friends of Godly Play,

The team at Godly Play is so encouraged and grateful for your continued support. You – our donors, trainers, missioners, practitioners and adult mentors – are finding beautiful and unique ways to invite more children to explore their spiritual lives and existential questions through story, wonder, and play.

Creating an icon is a process of surrender. As the artist, you are not making something new or unique. In fact, it is not your image to alter. You are “writing” (or copying) an image that was created hundreds of years ago, an image that has been painted over and over again.

The journey is now. Deep words. For the past 14 years I have been blessed to be on this journey at a home for children who have been through severe abuse and trauma. It is called Thompson, located in North Carolina.

Godly Play claims to be a method for the spiritual development of children, but when Godly Play found me, it was my adult need for spiritual development that it met. I was in my early 30’s and skeptical of organized religion. Most of what I saw and heard in mainstream Christianity seemed to value rigid ideas of right and wrong over the kind of complexity and ambiguity that can lead to a deeper encounter with the numinous. The goal, it seemed to me, was to pin down the Mystery and tie it up with a neat bow so we’d all know exactly what the rules were and how to play the game.

One of the joys of my first year as the Executive Director for the Godly Play Foundation was meeting so many of you and hearing your stories. Every week I get to hear stories of children making profound connections and of circles of children inspiring deep wonder with one another.