Godly Play Nourishing Children's Spirituality: A Case Study

Abstract

Godly Play, an approach to Religious Education in early childhood devised by Jerome W. Berryman, has been utilized by many Christian denominations in Sunday school contexts and it is currently influencing the design of early years’ Religious Education curricula in many Catholic dioceses. One of the appealing qualities of the Godly Play process is that it is understood to nurture the spiritual dimension of children's lives. But how exactly does it do this? In drawing on the author's own research, this exploratory article examines, through a case study, the way in which four particular characteristics of children's spirituality—the felt sense, integrating awareness, weaving the threads of meaning, and spiritual questing—are brought to the fore and are nurtured during the Godly Play process. In this way, the article attempts to demonstrate how, in a practical sense, the Godly Play process may nurture the spirituality of children who engage in this process.