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Becky Ramsey | Author & Children’s Minister
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What is Godly Play?
According to the Godly Play Foundation, Godly Play is a creative and imaginative approach to Christian nurture.
Godly Play is about understanding how each of the stories of God’s people connects with the child’s own experience and relationship with God.
Godly Play respects the innate spirituality of children and encourages curiosity and imagination in experiencing the mystery and joy of God.
Read more about Godly Play here.
How do we do Godly Play at First Baptist Greenville?
Christians of many different denominations use Godly Play and probably do it differently, even within the same denomination. In this blog, I describe Godly Play by sharing the way our church does it. That doesn’t mean that it’s the best way or the prescribed way, or the only way, of course, but it’s the way that suits us best.
What are we here for?
We meet here to talk about Godly Play, to share what it’s all about and to discuss how to do it better.
The weekly blog posts are designed to help Sunday school teachers prepare for their Godly Play lessons, and the individual pages (see the tabs at the top of this page) share information about how we do Godly Play at First Baptist Church, Greenville, SC.
We’d love to hear from teachers everywhere, not just the ones at our church! We hope you’ll join our circle and share your ideas!
What Godly Play is Not
Godly Play is quite different from the traditional model in which the teacher tells the children what they need to know. Godly Play is not about things that are that simple. It is not just about learning lessons or keeping children entertained. It is about locating each lesson in the whole system of Christian language and involving the creative process to discover the depths of meaning in them.
The Story of Daniel
Hi Godly Play Teachers!
Welcome to The Story of Daniel. You can find the script in the pink Volume 6, The Complete Guide to Godly Play, 15 Enrichment Presentations for Fall book on p.116-125.
Daniel’s life story provides children with so many themes to discover, each of them so important, including:
*the importance of living a life faithful to God
*the assurance that God will be close to God’s people forever
*if we ask for it, God will give us the courage needed to follow God when it goes against what the world values
*we can question God about the things we don’t understand
*God can sustain us in times of despair and give us hope.
As the children work during their response time, we can give them chances (by asking questions) to talk about these themes. It’s so important that the children don’t just walk away from Sunday school with a lion or a fiery furnace, but their own ideas of how the story applies to them.
Idea Sparkers For Our Give A Gift to God Time
1. Reproduce the story in some way.
Of course the BEST ideas for art response time come from the child herself, but here are some ideas to get our kids thinking. Hopefully they won’t follow anyone’s set of instructions verbatim, but will make something all their own.
There are plenty of directions out there for making artistic representations of Daniel in the Lion’s Den.
1. Here’s one of my favorites, a den of lions and a Daniel, all out of paper cups.
2. There’s a cute lion out of noodles, here, and other lion ideas here.
3. There’s a whole host of Daniel craft ideas here.
4. There’s a paper plate lion here.
5. Children could also make the fiery furnace scene. I found 3 good sites for this, here, here, and here.
2. You could also focus on God’s gift of courage- like the kind Daniel had- by making a bracelet celebrating courage like the ones here.
3. You could celebrate Daniel’s life by making a mural with all the scenes from the story.
4. Our Godly Play Daniel story leaves out the story I remember from my childhood: the part at the beginning, when Daniel was first taken captive to Babylon and asks permission to eat food other than that on the king’s table. You might want to present the story as scripted, and then ask the children if they know the part left out. The children could find it in the Bible (Daniel chapter 1) and figure out how to make it part of the Godly Play story. How would they tell that part of the story? What figure or drawing could they add to the story basket? What does this part of the story have to do with them (and not just about what kinds of food they eat!)
Find more ideas about responding to the Daniel story at my Pinterest Page here.
I hope these ideas help!
Love, Becky