VTS magazine

It was like any one of the days that makes me feel simultaneously confident and uncertain about the possibilities of finding the right place where God is calling me to be and serve. As usual, I searched and typed the keywords “care,” “practice,” “religion,” and “theology” to find job posts; many popped up, but I was moved to read: “The Berryman Family Chair for Children’s Spirituality and Nurture.” I not only saved the description but also pinned it. As a person who had worked and served with children from congregations to the church’s national office, and who also studied in different schools, I knew the limited possibilities of finding a job in such specific categories. I was clicking on my journey to Berryman’s legacy. His decades of work and ministerial commitment to children’s spirituality have declared that God cares and listens to children. In this way, Berryman’s legacy is not a past event to be remembered, but it is a missional engagement, cultural change, and new ecclesiological understanding in seeing, accepting, and ministering by and for children.

Berryman’s life touched not only my own, but many in the community he served, and the church as a whole through his formative work on children’s spiritualty and Godly Play. After I received the position, Jerome Berryman reached out to me and shared his heart about children. What I saw in his face and eyes was a deep eagerness to see what might come out of this position, how other seminaries and universities could eagerly do the same and hire a particular person who would be teaching, researching, and speaking about children and children’s spirituality. As a priest, scholar, and advocate for children, Berryman expressed his passion and love for serving children by creating a scholarly discourse about children’s spirituality and a practical approach called Godly Play. Godly Play, as he articulates, emphasizes interconnectedness, wonder, community, and an existential creative process, as a practical theological approach. Instead of static and colonial religious language, Berryman’s scholarship and living practice invites the Church and all of us to speak and play with children through life-giving creativity that engages with the holistic experience of children.