More about the Sacks in our Sunday School in a Sack program at St. Timothy Episcopal Church

 

We made a plan to provide sacks of materials to each family. We splurged on paper sacks with handles, and designed a logo that is printed on stickers.  We deliver sacks to porches every few weeks.  

Our first story was The Holy Bible from Volume 2 of "The Complete Guide to Godly Play" by Jerome Berryman.  We bought inexpensive, very plain NRSV Bibles and sent those out in the first bag.  Read more here about that choice.)  A calligrapher in the congregation wrote first names on shipping labels aka bookplates so there is plenty of room for decoration.  I recorded the Holy Bible story the first week, and invited the children to decorate their bookplate and have a parent help them put it in their Bible. 

We bought a lot of white bookmarks with holes already punched.  (Yes, we could have used cardstock, but I liked the bookmarks.) Each week I put lengths of yarn in for the tassel.  I am a knitter/yarn collector so I can choose a variety of colors. We also put a small label with the scripture citation on each bookmark.   When I record the story, I remind them to decorate the bookmark and place them in the Bible.  

A retired teacher with an old Cricut and a new Cricut and a huge imagination makes up crafts.  Each week she designs one craft to be an ornament, with a number, that somehow ties in with the story.  We are brainstorming a way for families to use these as an Advent calendar, we think. She also plans a craft or activity and builds the parts on the Cricut, or we assemble them into kits.  

We make up other activities to supplement the story.  For instance, one week I assembled pictures of Jerusalem and Jericho along with elevation pictures to go with Samaritan.  I wrote a photo scavenger hunt to go with the Pearl.  One week the retired teacher made pots of mystery seeds to be planted.  In a few weeks, we are adding gold boxes with a variety of supplies for “tell your own parable”.  We print the craft instructions and include the necessary supplies.

We usually include a packaged food snack - once there was microwave popcorn that was also for a craft project. That was popular, although some ate it before they noticed the craft instructions. 

We printed a set of address labels for the congregation, and every other sack, each child is asked to send a card to someone in the congregation.  We randomly choose the recipients, and eventually every member

of the congregation will get one, and then we will start over.  We also use the artwork we generate in the Zoom room to print thank you notes for the children to send to the helpers.  We address and include stamps on the cards and thank you notes to make it easy for families.  (More about the Zoom sessions in another post.)

I have gone through the Illustrated Ministry files I have purchased over the years and assigned coloring sheets to stories.  I have a variety of other files I have purchased too - Chalice Press, Etsy, and so on.  So we include coloring sheets or paper puzzles or resources or whatever we can find.  My house looked like a blizzard for a while but eventually they all were filed into folders.

I shopped back-to-school sales for art supplies.  We include those in bags when it makes sense.  It is always fun to get new stuff. I think we will add some plain cardstock or water color paper occasionally too.

Background: Why and how are we doing Sunday School in a Sack at St. Timothy Episcopal Church?

I have been at St. Timothy for a few years now.  We have been working out how to do Sunday School in a small church with a small population of children spread over a lot of ages.  I am a Godly Play trainer, and we have several trained but inexperienced GP teachers.  We were just making decisions about how to implement GP when we stopped attending church in person due to COVID-19.

After a few months, we decided we needed to do something.   First we planned a multi-generational Zoom art party focusing on Ascension.  Then we planned a Zoom Pentecost party, and dropped off bags of art supplies, s’more ingredients, and other assorted stuff to most of the congregation.  We had a talent show on Zoom for Pentecost.  We closed both parties with “Candle Walk.”

We had so much fun that we planned out a schedule of Godly Play stories.  We did parables this summer, and will start with Creation in September.  

We decided to loosely base this on GP.  I had to give up some of my GP/Montessori beliefs and let this become somewhat more Sunday School-ish.  I record Godly Play stories, and attempt to edit them. (Who knew I should have learned to edit video before all this?) I try to be very Godly Play when I record - if that makes sense.  In the story, I tell them where to find the story in the Bible and tell them they can decorate a bookmark for their own Bibles.  I invite them to do work of their choice, and mention art specifically.  We post the stories on the church’s Facebook page.

Part of our hope is to let parents work with kids, and also give the parents some rest from their kids, depending on how it’s going for them that week.  To support families, we purchased the Godly Play Parent Pages (you'll find them for Volumes 2, 3, and 4).  A Parent Page goes in every sack.  Some of our kids are just done with Zoom and with watching videos, so we hope the parents can share the stories the best they can, and ask the wondering questions that are included on the Parent Pages.  

Some families come to a weekly Zoom session, where I either tell the story live or play the recording, and we wonder together and show off what we have done.  

Every few weeks, we drop off sacks of supplies for families to enjoy together.  

Knowing Godly Play in a New Way Part 1

On a Facebook page called Knowing Godly Play in a New Way, focused on how we "do" Godly Play in the current reality of a world that is physically distanced, I asked about Bibles for an at-home program. I asked what version of the Bible to buy to give to the families for their work at home, and then it seemed like I rejected all the great ideas people offered.

Just to be clear: I am not against children's Bibles - and I am not against offering information to families. I think I sounded like I might be against those things in my original post.

Here, I am expanding a little bit about my thought process, in case you are still wondering. I do go on for a while in this post, but I realize that my thoughts were much bigger than the question I asked. Since I was really doing my own work, in the end, I decided it was worth posting on my long neglected blog.

What I was trying to formulate in my mind was how to support the story called The Holy Bible: Where the Church's Story Comes From, found in Volume 2 of The Complete Guide to Godly Play (Revised and Expanded) by Jerome W. Berryman. This story suggests these materials: a large, presentation-type Bible sitting on a book stand, and a tray of material for making book marks. In the "Notes on the Material" part of the lesson, it says that the Bible "should not be a 'children's Bible' with cartoon-like illustrations."

It is more than trying to support just that story, I think. I am also trying to develop support for our families who need to know that they have at home all that they need to support the spiritual development of their children. We, the church, will support the families, and still the families will be the primary support for the children in this new way of knowing Godly Play.

A quote from "Teaching Godly Play: How to Mentor the Spiritual Development of Children" by Jerome Berryman: "Godly Play attempts to teach the classical Christian language system to children in a way that deeply roots it in them and yet encourages them to be open and curious about new people, new situations, new ideas and even new religions. It does this by integrating the children's experience of God, their existential issues and the classical Christian language system by means of the creative process to make meaning. Godly Play, then, is not a whole ministry with children and families." (This quote is in an explanation about music, but to me it says a lot about the whole Godly Play experience.)

And finally, a quote from "Does God Have a Big Toe? Stories about Stories in the Bible" by Marc Gellman. The author's note has long informed my life! Rabbi Gellman says: "One way to understand a story is to have someone explain it to you. They will probably say, 'Listen to me, this is what that story means...' and then they will tell you something. That is one way to understand the Bible, but I don't think it's a very good way. The person who explains the story might be wrong and, in any event, explaining stories from the Bible only makes sense if there is just one right way to understand that story. But the stories in the Bible are so rich and deep and packed with a thousand different meanings that they cannot be explained in just one right way."

I welcome conversation about how we will know if what we are doing in this new way is Godly Play!