This week, though some of us are scattering for holiday travels, many of us will gather on Sunday morning for the annual MPC Christmas pageant. This year we are trying a new thing. We will be having a Godly Play pageant, using the Christmas story as it is told in our children’s classrooms. It will be told by a combination of children, youth, and adults, and it will be less of a performance piece than a storytime circle.
Godly Play is not just a curriculum but a philosophy of how we share sacred stories with the children of our church family. At the heart there is a belief that the children can discover and learn these stories best when the adult teachers make themselves childlike, rather than expecting the children to behave like adults. We learn to value children not simply as future adults, but as spiritual beings who in some ways already know more than we do. As such, the whole Godly Play classroom is child-sized and child-oriented. The toylike figures and images we use to tell stories are sized for small hands, and the words we use are carefully chosen to fit a smaller vocabulary… and to expand that vocabulary in deliberate ways.
When we share in the Godly Play Christmas Pageant this week, we will be adapting it to fit the large space of the sanctuary, as well as the large group of people – far too large to make a circle around the storyteller, single-file and cross-legged. The figures we use will not be child-sized toys, but children themselves, or youth or adults, as silent actors, moving on their own volition rather than waiting for the enormous hand of the Storyteller to swoop down and move them into their places. The images that in the classroom are 5”x7” plaques have been replaced by huge, poster-sized pieces of art, beautifully created for just this purpose. And, we’d like to leave some surprises for you to experience, but some of the sounds you might hear in a small classroom story circle have been magnified as well, to make a big impact in a large space!
So get ready for storytime. We’re doing our best to make sure that it feels like a circle of friends, rather than a theater production. We look forward to welcoming you warmly into the circle, as together we travel on the road to Bethlehem, getting ready to come close to the mystery of Christmas.
Every Blessing,
Talitha
PS Check out the script here: a-godly-play-christmas-pageant