easter 2015

Did you know that the phrase, Godly Play, is a registered trademark? Earlier this year, I had the opportunity to train as a facilitator in a very different sort of activity. I'm not going to say what, because I don't want to distract you. Maybe I'll write a blog post about it in the future. The point right now is that part of my training for this other activity included a very serious talk about the fact that its name was trademarked. Our trainer went so far as to encourage us to pronounce its name in our heads as ending with the letter R , to remind us that every time we wrote it we should add the  � .  We were told that only upon completion of the training would we be allowed to use the name in the titles of our activities. Anyone who hadn't done the training had to say that they were working in the style of this activity (and even then, to add the  � ). ( image source ) You know, I don't recall the topic of trademark coming up in my Godly Play�  training. But...

In some church calendars today is Good Shepherd Sunday. Our pastor's sermon included a section about how the word pastor  is from the Latin word for "shepherd". And it reminded me of a Godly Play moment that I experienced earlier this Spring. I was in the circle, listening to someone else tell the stories of the lesson, Knowing Jesus in a New Way. There are a lot of parallels between this lesson and The Faces of Easter . Both are a series of episodes which can be presented week by week or all at once. Neither set of materials includes figures to be moved around, but rather a series of pictures placed on an underlay which is unrolled further with each episode. Both end not with verbal wondering, but with an invitation to find something in the room to bring and place alongside the story materials, " to help us tell more ".  The stories in Knowing Jesus in a New Way are the resurrection appearances of Jesus. One episode of the lesson   is the last story from Matthe...