Together on the Journey: A Weekly Blog from Fr. Andrew Sheldon
This coming Monday, I will be in Denver attending the memorial service for my friend and mentor Jerome Berryman. As many of you know, Jerome was the creator of Godly Play, an imaginative method for nurturing the spirituality of children that we employ both at St George’s and at Kingsway College School. Jerome created Godly Play because he had a high regard for children and their spiritual capacity. And so, he devised this method which enables children to make meaning through story, wonder, and play.
Last week I introduced my indicators of a healthy church and so this week, in memory of Jerome, I want to focus on this indicator:
Children are welcomed and engaged.
In one of his books, Jerome posits the idea of children as sacramental; that is, that children are outward visible signs of God’s grace. After all, Jesus did once say that ‘unless you become like a child you cannot enter the kingdom of God’. Sacramental indeed! Inspired by this idea, many years ago I wrote an article titled ‘The Sacrament That Won’t Sit Still’. In it I wrote “that the Christian community must formalise the reception of the child in the same way they do the other sacraments. Initially, there must be teaching and consensus that the child is a means of grace. There must be practises that regularly expose the larger community to the child. There must be opportunity for the larger community to dialogue with the child. In other words, there will need to be the same institutional commitment to emphasising the centrality of the child in the Christian community as there is in emphasising the centrality of the other sacraments – and indeed, there will need to be the same institutional buy-in vis-à-vis resources, budgets, and priorities that there is around the other acknowledged sacraments. For instance, any church that will not hesitate to fully equip a sacristy with the vessels and vestments necessary to celebrate the Eucharist and baptism, should not hesitate to fully equip a Godly Play room or similar space for children with the highest-quality materials available.
“Receiving the child is crucial to our identity as church, as ones who advocate for and embody the kingdom of God. As such, it is not that the children need the Church to teach them how to be Christians, it is that the Church needs the children to teach her how to be Christian!”
I am happy to say that St George’s has done much of this. We do have a beautiful Godly Play room, children are engaged in our worship, we do invest in children’s ministry, and every week we provide spiritual nurture to hundreds of children through chapel at KCS. But, of course, we can do more and it will be important going forward to imagine the ways we can better incorporate children into our life together.
Jerome tells the story of a child entering church with her parents and, seeing Jerome at the front of the church, the child turns to her parents and says, ‘That’s the man who is happy to see me’. It was Jerome’s practice to greet each child at church by crouching down and saying, ‘I’m happy to see you’. I have tried to make that my practice personally, but I also hope that we can be a church who collectively sends the same message to each child that enters our space: We are happy to see you.
Andrew +