by Ken Evers-Hood
It started with four quarters. Every Friday night when I was a boy growing up in the 80s, I would put my hand out as my mom and I entered the grocery store. “Four quarters,” she would say to me. “Make ‘em last.” And I would. Galaga. Ms. Pac Man. And this crazy game I’ve never found again where you’re like a little Caesar character jumping through classical ruins.
I love games, and I’m not alone. We live in a game-filled culture. Half of Americans report playing video games. Countering the common assumption of the gamer as a lone teenage male, nearly half of these players are women and the average age of a gamer today in America is 35. The language of games pervades our culture, and our sessions and congregations can make epic gains by appreciating this language and adopting “gameful” practices.
Gameful practices
Innovative leaders in the church are catching on. After Mike Mather, pastor of Broadway United Methodist Church in Indianapolis, read Jane McGonigal’s “Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World,” he started wondering what would happen if his staff looked at urban ministry in a more playful way. Mather created a leaderboard and a point system. Actions like visiting people in their homes or workplaces, writing letters of encouragement and blessing and offering forgiveness to people carrying burdens of guilt and shame were worth one point. Throwing a party to celebrate God’s overflowing grace and love, on the other hand, was worth five points. At the end of the month, whoever wracked up the most points enjoyed the honor of buying everyone else a round of cupcakes.
Executive presbyter of Donagal Presbytery in Pennsylvania, Erin Cox-Holmes, shows us what this can look like on a larger scale. Her eyes light up when she talks about leadership through the lens of what she describes as gamer theory. Cox-Holmes cut her teeth doing Committee on Ministry work for Kiskiminitas Presbytery where she helped new leaders come on board and deal with conflict between existing leaders. She employs the language of levels when thinking about who to send into different kinds of situations. Early leaders in levels 1-5 are just starting out. They should be given concrete, simple tasks only. You might be tempted to promote them beyond the level where they can be successful. Level 5-10 leaders are advancing leaders. These are seasoned players who are now capable of leading groups and will level up quickly. Level 10-15 leaders provide the foundation for your mission. These are the folks that people trust and look to for guidance. The challenge here is asking them to step out of direct mission work so they can train up new blood. Level 15-20 leaders are high level. These are not only the leaders of teams, but the trainers of teams as well. Level 20 and above represent the highest level of expertise gained through years and years of experience. The greatest challenge is helping these leaders gracefully transition in the background seeing their legacy as supporting others to come to the fore. Cox-Holmes talks about being wise as a leadership body regarding who you send into certain situations. If you send a higher level leader to initiate a new ministry in the church, for example, you might consider pairing them with a fresh face, so this new leader can gain valuable experience without the pressure of going it alone.
Grace of the replay
Cox-Holmes also makes a connection between God’s grace and what she calls the grace of a replay. A “save point” is the place you return to as a player or team when you have experienced failure where a replay can start. Save points constitute of the most important aspects of gaming environments. Failure happens in the church. A lot. Fantastic sessions make good decisions that result in unfortunate outcomes. Great ruling elders have ideas that just don’t pan out at the time. Leaning into the grace of the replay means recognizing that our leadership rests not on our success, but on our faithfulness, our willingness to lean on God’s forgiveness — and asking for forgiveness and another chance when necessary.
The church I serve, Tualatin Presbyterian Church just outside of Portland, Oregon, is a diverse community. At one point we were approached by some of our progressive members wanting the session to take action to be more inclusive of our LGTBQ community. Our session wrestled with the request for a full year. We weighed different possibilities, and we wound up coming to a unanimous decision that we felt achieved a good balance. We felt brilliant. But, we didn’t think to bring the larger congregation into the conversation. While we were having courageous conversations as elders, the congregation was just experiencing life as usual. So when we presented them with our findings at an annual congregational meeting, you might imagine that they were … surprised. Some were less than thrilled. Who were we to suddenly spring these ideas on them? I was deluged with angry letters from frustrated people who felt cut out of our process. And I had to admit that they were right. I had made a mistake. As a session we were so focused on our deliberations we forgot to bring everyone else along. So, I made a lot of phone calls and asked for forgiveness. Fortunately, we experienced the grace of a replay, and I can look back at that moment as one of my less brilliant, but incredibly helpful, experiences.
Games generate community
Jason Brian Santos, coordinator for collegiate, young adult and youth ministry at the Presbyterian Mission Agency, developed a card game called UGrad that familiarizes players with UKirk (Presbyterian campus ministry) in a playful way. With a dizzying array of players — from seniors with no clue of what’s coming next, to a micro-managing TA who rearranges cards in the draw pile, to a national director who curiously resembles Santos himself — the game not only gives students a playful understanding of how power works in their new world, but it also shows how all of the cards come with strengths and weaknesses. This is exactly how ruling elders have to view one another as well as the whole congregation. Sometimes, the most important people for initiating something new are not the usual suspects, and it takes leaders who understand how to look far and wide for who God might be raising up.
Thinking, speaking gamefully
Gameful language also gives us the opportunity to wade into frightening territory where we need all the courage we can muster. The best stories have the worst enemies: the ghosts from Pac Man, Bowser from Mario Brothers, Count Dracula from Castelvania, and Mike Tyson from the classic Mike Tyson’s Punch Out. In Jürgen Moltmann’s “Theology of Play,” Robert E. Neale lifts up Jesus’ crucifixion as an example of how Jesus entered fully into our human adventure — even experiencing death on a cross. Leadership can feel frightening, where failure looms as an all-too-real threat. Gameful thinking can help us translate frightening situations into adventures where we are more open to what is possible than we are anxious about what could go wrong.
I’m part of a fantastic group of leaders reframing church decline through a gameful lens. A year ago at San Francisco Theological Seminary, Mary Hess, Sybrina Atwater, Heidi Campbell, Sarah Moore-Nokes and I prototyped a game we call “Remnants.” It was conceived as a live-action role-play in which different groups imagine a future situation where major church structures have disintegrated although fragments of the ecclesial past exist. The groups are asked to consider how they would observe fundamental pivot points of life: birth, death and tragedy.
In the game, we found that rather than wringing our hands about loss and the “good old days,” the groups were curious, imaginative, inventive and discovered new ways to express old truths. Given that the old structures are crumbling around us as church leaders, we hope that all leaders, you included, might face this new environment not with fear and negativity, but with a more playful, hopeful imagination, informed by our great Reformed tradition, but open to where the Holy Spirit is leading us to level up.
The followers of St. Francis were known as Les Jongleurs de Dieu — the jugglers, or jesters, of God who were constantly turning everything on its head. This is an exciting time to be a leader in the church, and I invite you to join me in becoming a Jongleur de Dieu, tumbling after God’s Holy Spirit into a new day.
KEN EVERS-HOOD pastors Tualatin Presbyterian Church outside of Portland, Oregon. He writes about behavioral theology and game theory while chasing around his three kids.
