Church Times Interview

published in Spring 2009 - I was sent a list of questions - they published the answers but not the questions ....

The main focus of my work in recent years has been to explore an ap­proach to Christian spiritual educa­tion called Godly Play, which I began to introduce in the UK about a decade ago.

It’s an approach that is quite counter-cultural. I do a fair amount of lecturing about children’s spiritu­ality for dioceses, ordinands, and other groups, and post-graduate super­vision and advising/teaching on the use of research methods I also write, and am just finishing a book on children’s spirituality for the ordinary person in the pew.

I love being part of something that not only inspires people to approach their spiritual-nurture ministry differently, but that also rejuvenates their own faith.

I really enjoy, too, that I work in an area that strikes a chord regardless of denomination or churchman­ship, and love working with groups that have quite significant differences of opinion, making a safe space for people to engage together — some­thing at the heart of the Godly Play process in fact.

Godly Play has taken off in so many places and directions. What I don’t like about my work is being unable to keep up and provide all the support that people request. Godly Play’s success is also its Achilles’ heel. It would be really good to be able to research and disseminate good prac­tices — but this depends on funding.

We’ve learnt so much about child­hood in the last century, in terms of children’s cognitive development, that we’ve forgotten that that’s not the whole story. In our attempts to make Christian teaching “child-appropri­ate”, the focus has been on pitching things at the right level intellectually. In fact, the whole “developmental” mindset places children at the bottom of the ladder and adults and experts at the top, and there’s a lot about spirituality that just doesn’t fit into that way of thinking — so it’s easier not to think about it at all perhaps.

Childhood and Christian nurture has been a bit of a Cinderella area ministry. Certainly very little atten­tion is paid to it in initial ministerial training. With a bit more theological reflection about the meaning and value of childhood, the spiritual pos­sib­il­ities might be more difficult to overlook.

Children and spirituality are both slippery concepts, and children’s nur­­ture makes very practical de­mands on people undertaking it. It’s easy to be fully occupied simply planning and carrying out the prac­tical work, without getting to grips with the underlying principles — of what it means to say that children are fully human and made in the image of God.

I grew up all over — Scotland, Ire­land, Switzerland, and London — which meant a variety of formative religious influences, too: Scottish Episcopalian, Irish RC, and Church of England. I studied psychology at the University of Manchester, then did postgraduate child-development re­search at Birmingham, Nottingham, and Cambridge.

My parents gave me a sense that my own spirituality as a child mattered, without being terribly “religious” about that. In recent years, my own children have been important influ­ences, too — sometimes inspirations, and sometimes reality checks on my thinking.

Academic influences include Jerome Berryman, who developed Godly Play in the first place in the US, and David Hay, with whom I collaborated in the early ’90s. But I’m the sort of person for whom negative influences can be equally important — so when I was advised by the first professor of psychology I worked for that it would be “academic suicide” to research the psychology of children’s spirituality as a Ph.D. topic, I knew I had found my path!

Spirituality is a normal, natural feature of simply being a child — rather than something we introduce. This shows itself in children’s capacity for and experiences of “relational con­sciousness” — awareness of rela­tion­ships to others, to the world, to God or to an inner self.

I’ve found that children’s spiritu­ality is often quite idiosyncratic — at its most authentic they choose their own ways to express this, which means often not using verbal reli­gious language. So we can easily miss it and spend our energies overwriting their complex spiritual life with rather dumbed-down Christian lan­guage.

It’s also erratic, like children them­selves: one moment it’s profound and prophetic, the next it’s almost forgotten. It’s not compartmen­talised, rarely brought out “just for Church” — indeed, sometimes that’s the one place it hides from. So it’s about their whole lives — their play, their crises, a way of thinking about impossible things and not about a way of thinking that simply gives answers.

Finally, children’s spirituality is fragile — children pick up that our culture does not value much of this. In our church culture, knowing the answers is prioritised over living with the questions. Children learn to sup­press their spiritual awareness, and most perceive the Church as having no interest in it at all.

The uniqueness and originality of a child’s spirituality is perhaps scary and challenging: its brightness and creativity next to our own, possibly duller, versions is sometimes a threat.

The bottom line seems to be that we lack the faith to believe that children and God know one another regard­less of our introductions.

I have a son at nursery, a son in prim­ary school who is a chorister at Ely Cathedral, and a daughter in second­ary school. Needless to say, each has their very own style of spirituality. They keep my feet somewhere near the ground.

I’ve led Sunday school wherever we’ve worshipped for the past 15 years — which before I came across Godly Play meant trying just about every approach available. But for the last year I’ve not been leading Sunday school at our new place of worship, Ely Cathedral, as it’s a rare chance to hear my chorister son sing one of the six services he sings each week.

Childhood is still mostly thought of as a holding area, a place to be held/distracted/conditioned until you are ready for proper worship and proper fellowship. I’d like to see the Church adopting a more prophetic, critical voice on behalf of children more widely, offering a theologically-informed challenge to the toxic practices that surround children today — especially the means-to-an-end culture in our schools, the abuse of children as consumers, and the scarcity of free play for its own sake.

Attending to its commitment to children will help the Church develop its commit­ments to adults enormously.

Current health-and-safety and child-protection legislation can exacerbate resistance to letting children be and to play — leaving no space for the Spirit, and consequently a kind of spiritual abuse. I think we need to attend more seriously, and theologically, to how trust is formed and maintained.

I’d love to see fewer words, more silence, symbol, and action. And I’d love to see more clergy who have com­mitted the key words in the baptism and eucharistic liturgies to heart.

I’ve just discovered Guitar Hero on the Wii. I’m really a viola player, but perhaps I could have been Jimi Hendrix?

We’re lucky that both my mother and my in-laws live just a few miles away. They are a great support both in terms of childcare, and when I’m laid low as I have an erratic and chronic immune disease.

I was asked, aged five, what I wanted to be. I was a pupil at an RC convent at the time — which possibly explains my somewhat unconventional an­swer: “to be a nun and a mother”. The nun thing wore off quite quickly, but I’d have been very sad not to have been a mother.

I think Fairtrade Advent calendars are good. They tick all the boxes: show the Christmas story, contain choc­olate, and are ethical. And they count the days of Advent, unlike some that now go up to New Year.

The proposal to abolish the role of national children’s advisers (also national advisers for youth, lay adult education, FE, and HE) in the Church of England is outrageous. Children’s work is often a volunteer-led min­istry, therefore it particularly requires strong professional and theologically-informed leadership at national and diocesan levels. Children have so little voice, the Church must be an advo­cate for them. Axing these posts is criminal.

When am I happiest? What comes to mind are family mealtimes when, for no particular reason, we start having very silly, surreal conversations, and I can end up laughing so hard I cry and have to leave the table.

Prayer takes many different forms for me — almost entirely informal when not at church, though I am very grateful for formal, traditional prayer there. It’s more a state of mind, becom­ing more aware of God’s pres­ence, and a mostly non-verbal twitter­ing that goes on between us.

I’d like to be locked in a church with my husband, Andrew. While the chil­dren are still young, we never get enough time on our own together, or even finish sentences, so this would be a luxury. He’d help me see the funny side of the situation, and he’d be very good at keeping me warm.

Rebecca Nye was talking to Terence Handley MacMath.