Beyond Sunday School: How Parents Can Bring Faith Home - Epiphany & Lent Bible Study with Bird Treacy
Episode 105, Published 03/01/2025, Listen Here — Transcript Below
Join us for a great conversation with Bird Treacy, a licensed Godly Play trainer and children’s ministry leader, to explore how children experience faith. This is the first of FIVE episodes with Bird. Given her love for Godly Play, we spend a bit of the time at the beginning introducing the concept. Then dive into John’s Prologue and the deep (if complicated) significance of Jesus as the Lamb of God. We also discuss how faith communities can truly know and nurture children beyond admiration—offering them a space to be fully seen and loved.
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Key moments in our conversation include:
(01:15 – 03:05) Introducing Bird Treacy & Her Work in Children’s Ministry
(03:05 – 05:31) What is Godly Play & Why Does It Matter?
(05:38 – 08:24) The Power & Mystery of John’s Prologue
(09:07 – 13:40) Being Called the #1 Predictor of Kids Staying in Church
(13:40 – 16:40) Jesus as the Lamb & The Lion
Things we talk about:
Bible Gateway - John 1:1-18 (CEB)
Fuller Youth Institute - https://fulleryouthinstitute.org/blog/moving-away-from-the-kid-table'
Bird has a WEALTH of Resource, stay in touch with her -- Website, Substack, @abirdinchurch (Instagram)
Let’s stay connected!
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Natalie Thomas
Hello and welcome to Bedtime Chapel's weekly Bible study episode. I'm Natalie Thomas.
00:00:05 James Thomas
And I'm James Thomas. We're deacons in the Episcopal Diocese of Massachusetts.
00:00:09 Natalie Thomas
And Bedtime Chapel grew out of a shared desire of ours to support families who are trying to center Jesus in a post Christian world.
00:00:16 James Thomas
We offer a nightly prayer service that includes a short Gospel reading. In this episode, we will be covering the readings for the end of Epiphany and the beginning of Lent.
00:00:26 Natalie Thomas
And we're here today with Bird, who we know from our shared ministry in the Diocese of Massachusetts and invited Bird to join us because of her expertise. Expertise might be a daunting word. Her experience and her commitment to children's and intergenerational ministry. I had the pleasure of serving at a church where Bird also has worked and heard really great things about her from the community and are just really excited to get to know you better through this conversation, Bird.
So if you want to get us started, we'll let you introduce yourself a bit in the stream of tell us a little bit about your life and your faith story that lets the Bedtime Chapel community get to know you and tell us a little bit about where you are in the church right now.
00:01:15 Bird Treacy
Great. Yeah, I'm glad to be here. So my name is Bird Tracy and I am currently the children's programming coordinator at a church in the Boston suburbs where I run a small godly play program and facilitate a variety of other special events. I'm also a licensed godly play trainer, which is sort of the big shaping passion of a lot of how I think about ministry with children and ministry really with people across ages.
And while I have a very rooted sense of foundations and call within the church, I also took a sort of sidelong path to get to my current work. I am, I always say, sort of a third generation church school lady. No one else in my family has done this professionally, but my mother was a Sunday school superintendent, my grandmother taught Sunday school, and I grew up very much in the pews every week at a Lutheran church in New York and was handed my first solo vacation Bible school class when I was 14.
So yeah, been at this for a minute.
00:02:34 Natalie Thomas
Yeah, I love that. I don't know if you know this, but I also grew up going to a Lutheran church, so there's a little connection there that we have. And you just spoke about your experience and that you've been steeped in the godly play curriculum because you do reference it often. It would be great if you would just start by sharing A little bit about Godly play and how it came to be and what might help people understand the way you'll reference it throughout the episodes.
00:03:05 Bird Treacy
Yes, absolutely. Because I am going to be incapable of talking about most of these readings without turning in some way to godly play. So Godly play is a, I want to say, for a lot of people, it's understood as being a curriculum. It's the most widely used children's formation program in the Episcopal Church.
And it also has roots across a number of denominations. And it is sort of a direct descendant of the Montessori tradition. So you have Maria Montessori, who is developing her entire understanding of children's development and how they learn and which is deeply rooted in Christian faith and turning to texts like her, the Mass explained for children and things like that.
Then you have a generation following that of a tradition called Catechesis of the Good shepherd, which is used much more widely in the Catholic Church, which was developed primarily by Sophia Cavalletti. And then you have Godly play. And so Cavalletti studied directly with Montessori. And Jerome Berryman, the founder of Godly Play, moved his entire family to Italy to study with Cavalletti.
And so over the last 40 plus years, he had been developing this language system, this notion of how children innately experience God and how we as adults help them learn the language and the associated tools that will help them grow into adults in the church while honoring where they are now. But it is also very much a spiritual practice.
And so, as I mentioned, I'm a godly play trainer. So I'm one of about 70 people in the US who teaches other people how to teach this program. And as part of that, anytime trainers are together or anytime we're facilitating a training for other people, the first thing we do is experience a full godly play session, which is hands on storytelling and wondering about the stories, because that is a spiritual practice for and we have to be grounded in our practice.
00:05:31 Natalie Thomas
So thank you so much for that explanation and that understanding of Godly play.
00:05:38 James Thomas
All right, let's jump into a couple questions that we thought about from the readings this week. And given your experience with younger children and with godly play, we want to get right into it. The week begins with the prologue to John's Gospel. As a deacon, I just recently had the opportunity to proclaim it in public several times.
Every time. Even whether reading in a private devotional or proclaiming in public, it never really loses its power. It's always a mind blowing experience to hear The Prologue to John. How have people of different ages, from preschool to school age to youth to young adults, even adults, made sense of this passage? And what helps people understand the complicated yet beautiful nature of the Prologue to John's Gospel?
00:06:22 Bird Treacy
I love the Prologue to John's Gospel so much as this piece of textual play. And it used to be the case that we actually used a very similar kind of chunk of language to introduce a story that we have in godly play called the Greatest Parable. And the Greatest Parable is a box of stories that actually just tells the kind of full arc of Jesus's life, that his life is the greatest parable.
And the first week that you would tell it, you would basically tell a version of the Prologue of John. And unfortunately, it has been cut in the revisions. It was a little hard, primarily on the teaching end. But I think there is actually something so radically playful about the Prologue that it leans into exactly the puzzles that particularly sort of middle to late elementary age children who are trying to get a handle on concepts around the Trinity, are trying to make sense of that it lends itself to, as children and youth get older, to really flexing some of our scriptural and creedal knowledge, that it's a lot of fun to, you know, take that text and read it alongside Genesis, to read it alongside the Nicene Creed.
And that for younger children, it's a hard one to crack open. And it's fun that it's hard to crack open because it's an opportunity for us as adults to say that we haven't solved it either by any stretch of the imagination, and to leave it open in that way to that wandering alongside them, that that's a really powerful piece of it.
And also, I would be remiss to overlook just the intensity of the language around light and the prologue, because in a godly place space, you have what's called a focal shelf. And the focal shelf is your kind of nativity, holy family layout. There's a tray that contains a good shepherd figure and sheep.
And then you have your Christ candle. And those two side pieces, your good shepherd and your candle, are there to be kind of two great statements about Jesus. I am the good shepherd and I am the light of the world. And the prologue to John really anchors us in that great.
00:09:07 Natalie Thomas
Thank you so much for bringing those thoughts up for us. In addition to the great prologue, John's opens with the telling of calling of the Disciples. And it's a very detailed narrative. There are specific, beautiful verses that highlight Jesus's intimacy with Nathaniel he says, before Philip called you, I saw you under the fig tree.
And that question for us is, how do we cultivate that kind of an understanding of a personal relationship with us, with our kids and our communities with Jesus, one that affirms that we are known and being called as unique individuals to follow God?
00:09:49 Bird Treacy
I think so much of knowing that we are known and that our communities and our children are known and that that sense of call, so much of that leans on the way in which we are in relationship to each other in our sort of week to week parish lives. And so I always think about, there's research that shows that the greatest predictor of long term faith engagement for children as they grow into adulthood is that they have had 5 non parent adults in their childhood faith communities that know them and are invested in their lives beyond the church.
And so in order to be able to feel like you are known and called by God to follow Jesus, you also have to be really critically known, fully, really fully known by the people who surround you week in and week out. And that that makes a huge difference. And when I say fully known, or even I did not love critically known when it came out of my mouth, but actually it's not wrong, what that calls me to think about is something that we sometimes crack open in talking about the spirituality of children and how the church is really good historically at admiring children, at seeing them as this sort of unsullied, perfect in, sort of not sinless, but kind of untouched by the world ways.
But admiring children isn't the same as loving them. And Jesus points us towards loving children in their wholeness and for who they are now and who they are as they grow into adults and not just that sort of shiny admiration. And so when we fully see each other, that is actually the kind of love and the kind of call that Jesus ushers us into.
00:12:12 Natalie Thomas
Wow, that is so powerful and so beautiful. Thank you for that. It makes me think of something that we talk about often, which is that the church is supposed to be a community in which we can practice a different way of being in the world. And so how do our churches practice this way of knowing one another across intergenerational relationships, of really being curious and wanting to understand what is going on in each other's lives.
I'm particularly thinking about being known across racial difference. There's a statistic around how many more people who are white will describe black children as being cute or precious or something like that as young kids. And the words change drastically as they see adult images across Race and difference. And so when I'm hearing you speak, I'm thinking about the importance of knowing the parts of us that are lovable.
And yes, my three year old, our three year old has some unlovable parts and there needs to be space for that in the church. You know, there needs to be space for her to have a hard time during Mass or for her to, you know, whatever these things are that complicate us as humans.
How do we move past an admiration or even an infantilization of children in a way that prevents them from being seen in a way that builds true connection and relationship in the church?
00:13:40 James Thomas
Thanks for all that. And lastly, for our last question for our scripture study this week. Up to this point, we've been reading mostly from the Synoptic Gospels, mostly from Luke and Advent and Mark through epiphany. And in both of these Gospels, we often hear Jesus referred to by the title the Human One.
That's the common English Bible translation that has more historically been rendered as Son of Man. But here in John, we get introduced to a new title in this week's readings where Jesus is referred to as the Lamb of God. Can you give us a little insight to that name or that title for Jesus?
And how have you introduced the many names of Jesus to kids to help deepen their understanding of who he is?
00:14:25 Bird Treacy
Yeah. So in order to deal with the concept of the Lamb of God, we have to sort of confront a substitutionary atonement framework. Whether or not that is our particular theology, it is inescapable in terms of talking about, you know, the Lamb that was slain and the place of Jesus on the cross.
There is all of this foreshadowing of Jesus's death through the language of the Lamb. And so over time, historic theologians have really grappled with this particular representation historically. When we look back to the Old Testament framework of the scapegoat who is sacrificed for the sins of the community. The scapegoat, as understood by Saint Anselm, is a figure that does not have any knowledge of its role.
It is essentially a sort of blank slate that then acts as a stand in. But the Lamb of God is the knowing sacrifice. The Lamb of God is sacrificed with an awareness of the why, of its role. And then following from that down the line, we get thinkers like St. Augustine who take us through the Lamb of God language in both John and Revelation, where we also see Christ as the lion in resurrection and in the conquering of death.
And so the Lamb and the lion existing side by side in who Jesus is in coming into the world, there is the gentle lamb that takes on death, that is the sacrifice and the lion who overcomes it. And so the Lamb of God language is actually part of a duality when read alongside the text in Revelation.
As far as introducing these many names of Jesus, and Jesus has a lot of names. I have a PDF that lives in my piles and piles of resources, that is Christmas ornaments that are just designs that include the many names of Jesus. And so you've got your Son of Man, Lamb of God, the true way, the true or the gate, the vine, Emmanuel, God with us, all of those endless names.
And I think, and I will say that as much as I foster intergenerational programming and I work across age groups, my kind of tender sweet spot is elementary and below. So I spend a lot of time either with my sort of pre K through third graders in my life now or with a very, like, wonderful group of fourth through sixth graders with some really big questions.
And so those are. Those are my core age groups where I tend to find myself working. And we have a hard enough time with, say, the very narrow distinction of, like, there's not a difference between the Holy Spirit and the Holy Ghost. Trying to bring too many names of Jesus into this actually isn't helping us know Jesus as much as the Faces of Jesus, which is our Lent story in godly play.
And sort of a secondary supplementary material I.e. faces of Jesus from around the World, which, in fact takes us back to these questions of race and representation and knowingness that you were bringing up before, Natalie, is that this is a international set of representations of the faces of Jesus, because the names do take us somewhere scripturally, but they become a little burdensome, I think, like, there are fun, like, wooden jigsaw puzzles where each symbol is a name of Jesus.
And that's very neat. But knowing Jesus in this sort of material sense of, oh, yeah, Jesus was also an imperfect child who annoyed his mom sometimes and, you know, played with his cousins and ran around and got into a little bit of trouble. You know, that that's actually the knowingness. Yeah. That I tend to be working towards.
Yeah, yeah.
00:19:16 Natalie Thomas
I mean, in our home right now, we have been introducing Santa Claus as Saint Nick. And Phoebe can't even wrap her mind around the fact that St. Nick and Santa Claus are the same person. So I'm with you on the. On the names. She's like, I'd like Santa to come. And I said, well, I do think St.
Nick might be bestowing generosity on us. And she's like, well, I don't want St. Nick, I want Santa. Thank you so much, Bird, for joining us today. And always huge gratitude to James, who does so much behind the scenes editing and figuring out work to keep us going here on this podcast. And thank you to the wider community of people who are praying with us, who are joining us on a nightly basis, and we want to be in touch with you.
You can find us on Facebook or Instagram, or write us an email everywhere. We are bedtime chapel bedtimechapelmail.com and all of this can be found on our website, bedtimechapel.com and until next time, we will be praying with you.
