Notes from the Godly Play Classroom: “What can we take out?”

I wonder—what could we leave out of the story, and still have all the story we need? This is one of the usual questions we wonder about with our students at the end of a Godly Play story. The storyteller asks the question, and often waits through a bit of silence until a student has something to offer.

In a classroom recently, storyteller John didn’t want anyone to take something out of the story of Saint Thomas Aquinas. When a child proposed taking out “going to the monastery really little,” John said, “But would he have learned about Jesus without it?” And when someone proposed taking out “going to school,” John said, “But that was where he learned about Aristotle.” When someone offered to take out “being called the ox,” he accepted this idea, saying, “Maybe he could’ve not been called that.”

John seemed concerned that students understand how each part of the story contributed to the whole. He used this question as a kind of review, highlighting what he understood to be the crucial elements of each step in the saint’s life. This could be a helpful approach, especially for older students who are thinking about how we come to know God in our lives.

However, for young children (under age ten) in Godly Play, this question is an important place for reaction and imagination. 

Reaction : Children may find parts of the story troubling, confusing, or boring (like how Thomas left his family at a young age, or how he went to school for such a long time). This question is a time for them to express their desire to take these things out of the story. We might think of how adults in a Bible study could react to Scripture: “I hate this part!” “I wish this weren’t in here.” “I just don’t know what to make of this.” We can think, too, of how theologians, scholars, and preachers discuss different aspects of Scripture. For example, we try to read a passage with an awareness of the sexism or violence in it, and would like to take out those parts from our own application of the passage. So this question accustoms young people to noticing and expressing what they find unappealing or troubling in Scripture or in the Christian tradition. Children learn that it’s okay to react by saying (directly or indirectly), “I don’t like that!” And, just as important, it’s a chance for students to hear that people want to take out different parts of things—a first experience of disagreement about what exactly is “all the story we need”! 

Imagination : In adult Bible studies, people often express desires that something could have been written a different way. For example, What if the Revelation had been written by a woman, and the symbol of destruction was not the Whore but something masculine? Or what if Queen Michal had been able to do something other than simply disagree with King David? What if Jesus had said something explicitly about how slavery is wrong? (These questions have all been brought up in the Bible Study I lead at the church.) These are important questions which highlight the difference between our context and the Bible’s, and also ask us to think through what parts of the text are essential, or how the integrity of the text can be kept even as we interpret it. This Godly Play question—What part of the story could we leave out, and still have all the story we need?—prefigures these sorts of more complex questions.

For these reasons, we should not prevent children the space to react and imagine. Sometimes we may be surprised by what a child shares. Perhaps we are troubled to hear that a student would like to take out part of the Bible—we wonder if the child has understood how important the Bible is! Or we don’t like that the child would like to take out something that we believe is good for them, like school or family or learning.

When we are inclined to disagree with a child, or to show them how their reaction or imagining is “wrong,” we should pause and notice what we are feeling. Perhaps something is at stake for us, that we do not want this child to react this way, or imagine such a thing. Because we are the teacher, whose job is to love the student and make space for them, we can then put aside our own concerns and respond to their wondering with an appreciative “Hmm!”