Parable of the Mustard Seed

This week at our Familienbrunch (Family Brunch) I shared the Parable of the Mustard Seed with the children.  Jesus told this story when asked to describe his Father’s kingdom and likens it to the smallest of all seeds that grows into a large bush-like tree.  One of the things that Godly play does well is allowing the listener to enter into the mystery of God without too much being explained away.  And GP’s treatment of the parables is excellent. Even though I have heard this parable all of my life, I discover some new aspect each time I tell it that I hadn’t thought of before.

Below is a picture of the materials that I used.  Traditional GP materials are always made of wood, but it can be quite expensive when you are first starting out to purchase all the materials.  And while I tend to be a jack-of-all-trades, carpentry is not one of the things I have experience with!  As a result, I use natural materials as often as possible, but I am not above using Playmobil figures when appropriate to the story.

The questions in the Ergründungsgespräch (The Wondering Phase) at the end are great:  What did the sower do while waiting for the mustard seed to grow?  Could one take the tree and put it back into the ground?  Was the sower happy when the birds came?  What could the tree be? What or who could the trees be?  The kids were a bit restless during this part today, so it was challenging to keep them on track. : )  However, one of the older three-year-olds was fully engaged and had some interesting answers. 

For the Creative Phase, we painted flowerpots and planted cress, an edible and fast-growing plant found in Germany.  I like to do activities in children’s church that help them explore God’s creation. Many children in the western world and in big cities are somewhat disconnected from nature, and I believe that experiencing nature is vital to children being able to explore the character of God and understand the Bible.  It is also amazing how much joy children find in getting their hands dirty with planting seeds and then being able to eat the fruits of their labor.   The inspiration for this project came from Nataša, a Montessori teacher in Croatia, whose blog, Leptir, I follow. 

One of the Montessori elements that I also value and try to implement in our children’s worship services is the idea of giving the children different options instead of having them all do the same thing at the same time.  While there is always some sort of artistic way of exploring the story, the children may also choose to play with the materials in the story. 

This week I offered another option which was a hit.  (It, too, was inspired by Nataša in Croatia!)  One classic Montessori exercise to develop fine motor skills and the ability to classify and categorize is to have the children transfer objects with a tweezer from one place to another.  Here to go along with the theme of planting, I placed dried beans in a bowl of sand and had the children fish them out with tweezers and transfer them to another bowl.  

Update 2012: Please click here to see a later post on the Parable of the Mustard Seed and here to find out about the new materials.

Stumbling upon Godly Play

I “stumbled” upon Godly Play in the summer of 2009 while visiting the States for three months.  We were about to embark on our third church plant in Berlin and I was looking for some ideas of how to incorporate art into the children’s worship experience.  I also knew that, as with any new church plant, there would be children of various age levels and only one children’s worker (me!) at least at first.

While talking to my friend, Kate, who is an art teacher in Texas, she mentioned that she knew of one church in the Dallas area that had a serious concept of art in its children’s program.  I googled this church and did not find much specifically about art and children’s worship, but the website did mention that the children’s program was something called Godly Play.  I immediately began to research Godly Play and found that it was Montessori-based, incorporated art, and would work with groups of children made up of different age groups.  And if those weren’t enough reasons to be sold on it, I then found books in German about Godly Play and ordered them without thinking twice.

When I got back to Berlin in the fall, I and another mother began to experiment with telling the stories.  I knew that we were on to something, but having never actually seen an experienced person tell the stories, we weren’t really sure what we were doing. Also, we found some of the questions during the Ergründingsgespräch (The Wondering Phase) to be a bit silly, because we didn’t understand the pedagogical philosophy behind it.  Then, my dear friend Sarah, who I’ve mentioned in previous posts, suggested that I search for someone in Berlin who was doing Godly Play and talk to them about my questions.  (Why didn’t I think of that?!!) 

So I found the Godly Play Germany website and found they were having a “Kennenlernen Tag” in a month in Berlin!  There, I met my friend and Godly Play Trainer, Ulrike.  As soon as I heard and saw her tell the first story, I was hooked.  This was truly an art form and a worship experience.  The materials were beautiful; the language was simple, yet poetic; and I realized the questions helped adults and not just children think in a new way.

A few months later, I enrolled for a week-long course near Kölln (Cologne).  About 500 Euros and 35 hours later, I became an official Godly Play Erzählerin (Storyteller).  And it was worth every penny and second. 

As with most important things in my life, I “stumbled” onto it at just the right time because of my heavenly Father’s gently leading. Not only has Godly Play enabled me to help children explore God in a way that I couldn’t have helped them before, it has also deepened my own relationship with God by helping me to ask questions and express things that I would never have asked before.

The woman on the left in the picture below is Ulrike and I learned most of what I know about Godly Play from her.

During our week-long course, each student had to prepare and present a story with an evaluation from the group afterwards.  This is me telling the parable of the Pearl of Great Price.

This is the remarkable group of people that I studied with.  We were comprised of seven Catholics, two from the Landeskirche (what we would call the state Protestant Church in English) and me from the Freikirche (non-state Protestant church). Quite an ecumenical group!

What is Godly Play?

How do I summarize Godly Play?  The technical definition would be that it is a form of religious education that developed out of the teachings of Maria Montessori.  But it is much more than that.  It is storytelling at its best. It is an art form.  It is a gateway to exploring the Biblical narrative and helping others find their way within as well.  It is a language teacher that helps young children find words to describe what they experience with God. It is a way of preparing one's self to meet with the triune God.

Maria Montessori was the first woman to gain a medical degree from the University of Rome. At age 40, she stopped practicing medicine in order to devote herself entirely to the world of education and she revolutionized it.  Though a devout Catholic, she never specifically developed her ideas in the area of religious pedagogy.  Her successors eventually took on this challenge.   In the year that I was born (1971!), an episcopal priest named Jerome Berryman from Houston, Texas travelled to Bergamo, Italy to study with Montessori's direct successors.  Out of his educational experiences there, Berryman developed the concept of Godly Play and put his ideas into practice at Christ Cathedral in Houston.

Godly Play is quiet, meditative and thoroughly engaging.  A storyteller sits with children in a circle around him.  The children are asked to if they are ready to hear a story.  Then storyteller then begins to tell a Biblical story using natural materials (wood, paper, felt, sand, etc.).  He intentionally doesn't make eye contact with the children, but is completely focused on the story, so that the listeners become absorbed in what they are hearing.

After the story, the storyteller leads the children in an "Ergründungsgespräch", which literally translates as "to fathom" and "conversation".  In English, this is called "The Wondering Phase".  The storyteller asks open-ended questions beginning with phrases like "Ich frage mich . . . " (literally: I ask myself . . ., but English-speaking storytellers say, "I wonder . . .") invites the listeners to say whatever is on their minds. The questions sound a bit strange the first time you hear them, but they are designed with intention to allow the listener to identify with and put themselves within the story.  I have to admit that I was shocked the first time I heard this phase described as "The Wondering Phase" in English, because it sounded to my ears a bit too fairy tale-ish.  (I first learned about Godly Play entirely in German and it wasn't until much later that I became acquainted with any of the English terms. ) 

Afterwards comes the "Creative Phase" in which the children are invited to pick out artistic materials to express their thoughts and respond to what they have heard.  They are also allowed to play with the story they have heard or pick another story from the shelves in the room to play with, which is very important since children learn by playing.  In case you're wondering (no pun intended), a  typical Godly Play worship also has a prayer time with the children, worship in the form of singing, and a "feast", a snack that also has the idea of communion embedded within it.

Although Godly Play came from America, it has been translated into the culture here in a thoroughly German way.  There is a German non-profit made up mostly of theologians and professionals who are now writing their own original Godly Play stories instead of merely translating Berryman's stories.  They also train people (like me) to do Godly Play in churches and schools.

That's about all I can describe in one post and any Godly Play enthusiast will tell you that I left out a lot, but I hope to talk more about specific aspects in future posts.

Below is a picture of Erich playing with some of the materials. You can see Jonah, the Nativity, the Risen Christ and Mount Sinai being used as a boat with the articles of the tabernacle in them: : )  The sand is our "Wüstensack" (Desert Bag).

Creative Phase: The Tabernacle

The church plant that we are a part of offers a Family Brunch twice a month.  We brunch together and then I lead a children's worship service afterwards.  Last Sunday, I told the children the Godly Play story, "Die Bundeslade und das Zelt der Begegnung" ("The Ark of the Covenant and the Tent of Meeting").  The story was completely new to the children and even my son, who is quite knowledgeable about the Bible, was unfamiliar with the Tabernacle and its furnishings. 

Typically, after a Godly Play Story, the children choose their own art materials and express their thoughts on the story (or anything else they are thinking about!) to explore what they have heard or express worship to God.  There is a great discussion in German Godly Play circles about whether the creative phase can be "angeleitet" (instructional or not) and this same discussion is also going on in the Montessori world over how much an art lesson/project can be instructional.  (If it bugs anyone that I throw German words into my sentences, I can't do anything about it.  It just expresses who I am during this season of life.)  I happen to think that it can as long as the children have room to determine the course and outcome of their creation and I experiment with such in our worship service.

All that to say that on Sunday, we had an instructional creative phase based on the Tabernacle story.  I got the idea while doing an autumn art project from Deep Space Sparkle with my kids in which we painted leaves with white paint and made prints on black paper.

1. First I made stamps for the children using foam rubber and sponges based on the furniture in the Tabernacle (accidentally left out the bronze basin filled with water!), symbols for the Trinity, and a person.

(You might be wondering why I included the symbols for the Trinity.  I have been heavily influenced by Tim Keller's "Christocentric" method of teaching and I try to help the children see that the Old and New Testaments have a natural relationship to them rather than being separate entities that have nothing to do with one another.)

2. Next I instructed the children to think of a place where there they like to meet with God and paint this as a background of sorts.

3. Then, the children were encouraged to add the stamps, as many or as few as they saw fit, to their pictures.

The children, even the youngest (age 3), took lots of time with their pictures and the results were quite dramatic. (They especially loved the gold paint!)

 (age 7)

 (age 6)

(age 3)

(age 4)

I love my job!!