Godly Play Religion

I’ve worked in the children’s ministry known as Kids Church at Urban Village Church – Andersonville on and off for about three years now. Last year we launched Godly Play as our curriculum for Kids Church but took a break from utilizing this curriculum over the summer. This month we have picked the Godly Play curriculum back up. I decided to interview the children on their first day of Kids Church. I thought, as a teacher, it would be good to ask the children ‘What is God?’ at the beginning of the year and then again at the end of the year. This will allow me and my fellow volunteer teachers to see what our children’s embedded theology is and how it evolves through the next year.
During our “feast” time I asked the four children that were
Our values as a church are that we are bold, inclusive, and relevant with our mission statement being “To create Jesus loving, inclusive communities that ignite the city.” This child’s family has been attending our church for the past two years, so this is a message he has heard over and over every single Sunday at the beginning of church. Over the summer in Kids Church we also had the children work through the mission statement word by word to see what that meant, and how we live it all out in church. In addition, his parents are very welcoming and justice oriented. They want to make our society a place where no one is disenfranchised and want to raise their children with this
The girl who told me this likened God to Voldemort in JK Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone who lived in Professor Quirrell’s head. She thought the concept of God being everywhere was “creepy”, but that she wasn’t afraid of God. This girl has been steadily working her way through the first Harry Potter book and is using this help shape her meaning-perspective. “Meaning-perspectives, frames of reference, are the structures through which experience is focused.” She has learned and heard that God is powerful enough to be everywhere and with everyone. She equates that kind of power with magic. Harry Potter allows her a frame of reference for that fantastic, magical concept. “For every Chrstian, correlating is at its base the task of relating theology to the circumstances of their lives, and vice versa.”
I must admit that as one of the Christian educators for all of these children I was very excited to hear the variety of answers I received. In the spring of 2015 one of our interns asked the children this same question and the responses were very different. The answers then were along the lines of God being an old man up in the clouds far away. In just six months their impression of God has changed drastically! All of their answers illustrate that we are making a concentrated effort to ensure that God is not envisioned racially or a specific