Pastor Wes' Sabbatical Proposal
Introduction
Pastor Wes is applying for a sabbatical grant from the Lilly Foundation which, if granted, will allow him to take a sabbatical July-October in 2025 at no cost to the church. Below is his opening essay for the grant.
I love to play. I have great joy when I engage with a new piece of software or gadget which requires me to spend time playing with it in order to familiarize myself with how it works, and then putting the resource to real-world use. Play has been part of my pastoral ministry, as well. Over my twenty years at Central Baptist Church of Riverton-Palmyra I have had a passion to incorporate experiential play into spiritual growth and discipleship. I’ve lead discussion groups on the ways popular culture deals with issues of spirituality and faith, made comedic videos to illustrate points of sermons or to highlight new discipleship arcs, and incorporated short-story writing as the backbone for a Bible study. Play is an important aspect of how I connect with others.
In the early days of the Pandemic my love of play reconnected me with the role playing games of my youth. A group of my friends gathered online to play Dungeons & Dragons, playing an extended game which dealt with issues of injustice, privilege, and temptation. It was a remarkable experience, which reawakened me to the joys of storytelling only possible through role-playing. Six months into the Pandemic I was planning to run my own adventures, a year in to the pandemic I began expanding to other systems, and two years in I created a YouTube channel to explore the role playing hobby space even more. Over the two years the channel has been active I’ve built up an audience of over 2400 subscribers.
Throughout this process I began to wonder if a role playing game could be used as an aid in spiritual development as an extension of my pastoral ministry. Role playing games are already used in therapy to help people of all ages process trauma and re-learn how to trust other people, and I wondered if they could be used as a way to encourage people to ponder the way of Christ by opening people up to imaginative possibilities. During my sabbatical I intend to converse with game designers, read books on the psychology and spirituality of play, and develop a game which can help people explore the teachings of Christ in new and imaginative ways.
It is important that I state this game will not attempt to gamify the teaching of dogma. I have a deep appreciation for both the dogma of the faith, and stories from which it emerged, but gamifying the teaching of dogma risks reducing the faith itself to a game mechanic. Attempts have been made to use role playing games teach a particular bent of Christian dogma, notably the game Dragonraid back in the 1980s, but gamifying the faith fell into a number of traps. Dragonraid, in particular, used Scripture memorization to unleash magical effects in the game world—triggering the divine to respond to entreaties by proper ritual practice. This is a game mechanic cultural anthropologists would consider magic, which is opposite of my goals for the game. Rather, my desire is to create a game system which examines the “wells” from which the characters’ life outlook is drawn, and explore how those wells impact the types of actions the characters make in the game world. As such, the spirituality being explored in the game will be based on praxis which emerges from Jesus’ teachings—with a strong ethical bent. Telling our own stories which interact with Jesus’ teaching is similar, in fact, to the way the Gospels authors work through Jesus’ teachings within a narrative structure.
For twenty years my refrain has been that we are part of God’s story of redemption—story has always been an important part of my pastoral ministry. I don’t simply preach, I tell the story of Scripture in ways my congregation will comprehend. Stories are powerful, and I’ve witnessed them twisted into lies which blind us to much evil. My desire is to use stories, told within the framework of a game, as tools which both encourage self-reflection and promote shalom—the way Jesus did through his parables. I believe such stories can help create a bridge of understanding between religious and non-religious neighbors.