As a national trainer for the Godly Play Foundation, I gather every other year with fellow trainers from around the country to connect, share stories, and dream about the future of Godly Play.
God is in this place.
This year was especially meaningful: In October, we met at Virginia Theological Seminary for the opening of the Jerome W. Berryman Special Collection and Archive.
The collection holds more than 800 volumes Berryman gathered over a lifetime of work in the theology of childhood, Christian formation, children’s spirituality, and pastoral care.
It offers scholars and practitioners new insight into Godly Play, its founder, and the wider field of childhood and religion.
From the Center for the Theology of Childhood:
“In 1960, while a student at Princeton Theological Seminary, Jerome Berryman found himself wondering how children could retain what they already knew of God through lived experience, while also growing in mature Christian understanding. … His own experience of God as a child had not been structured or systematized. It had been immediate—woven into ordinary life, unseparated from imagination, nature, and relationships.”
More than sixty years later, we are part of this story.
It is a story that welcomes, honors, nurtures, and celebrates the children of today and helps them grow in awareness of what they already know in their hearts: God is in this place.
