Everyday Godly Play!
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.
A young child working with the Advent Lessons at home
For nearly half a century of telling stories with children and adult mentors, we know that Godly Play has the potential to offer both children and adults a way of engaging with the Christian faith that connects to their authentic selves. Godly Play allows us to internalize the stories of our faith and lives to invite individuals to experience a sense of hope, healing, and integration. Our work has impacted hundreds of adult mentors and thousands of children worldwide, and by centering our work on the innate spiritual lives of children, we learned that the lives of adults were also transformed through Godly Play. We are well situated and excited to expand our work to support the spiritual formation of children in the home by focusing on parents and caregivers.
Enabled by a Lilly Endowment Inc. planning grant in the Spring of 2022, we conducted a series of listening and learning sessions with parents, focus groups with congregational leaders, and gathered data from surveys. Through this research, we gained an understanding of the felt needs of parents and caregivers—targeting both parents on the edges of Christian community and those embedded in Christian community. These gatherings and conversations allowed us to imagine new possibilities for how Godly Play can expand resources for parents and caregivers that honor their family journey, inviting them to weave their stories with the stories of God's people to find meaning and purpose.
We learned that while parents and caregivers long to support the faith lives of their children more intentionally, there are significant barriers, including personal and family stress, religious trauma, lack of resources, and insufficient community support. Additionally, we found a disconnect between the felt needs of parents and caregivers and congregational leader perceptions regarding what parents and caregivers want and need from their faith communities.
Everyday Godly Play is a multi-dimensional project to expand our resources to support parents and caregivers in their homes and through their faith communities. The overarching goals of this project are to:
Empower parents and caregivers to foster a sustainable and integrated family spirituality through these critical activities, equipping them to incorporate rhythm, wonder, play, and narrative in their relationships with their children by providing access to resources, courses, storytelling materials, and community support.
Equip religious education professionals to imagine and implement innovative models for empowering and equipping parents and caregivers to sustain an integrated family spirituality.
Support clergy and church leadership in cultivating a faith community that embraces and promotes a holistic approach to ministry centered on the spiritual needs of children and families.
The project will include an online hub for resources, inspiration, and community building for parents and caregivers with relevant pathways for religious education leaders.
Resources will include:
Biblical storytelling materials for families in the home
A repository of visual and audio resources for parents and caregivers on children’s spirituality from a Godly Play framework
Expanding on Berryman’s Stories of God at Home to provide support for home-based practices for narrative, wonder, play, and rhythm
Training and certification for religious education professions and clergy regarding children’s spirituality
Parent/caregiver spiritual companionships
Workshops for church leaders on trauma-informed practice, current family needs, and other relevant topics.
Beyond the online hub, the Everyday Godly Play project will include innovative ministry grants to support new ways of engaging families in congregations.
A family listens to The Great Family around a campfire.
We are thrilled for this unique opportunity to expand the incredible work of Godly Play and provide new ways for children to come close to the mystery of God through wonder, play, rhythm, and narrative in their homes and communities.
In March 2023, we held a virtual gathering to share more about what we heard from families and details about the Everyday Godly Play projects. View the recording HERE.
