It’s some five years since Scripture Union started looking at the challenge of how to help children aged 8 to 11 connect with God, through the Bible, in a new way. It was not an issue that started with digital technology but delving into possible solutions brought the digital realm quickly to the fore. The outcome is Guardians of Ancora, an app designed to give children a compelling interactive experience, in an environment where faith can thrive, by playing a game that has Bible engagement and faith formation at its heart.

The journey from original challenge to outcome, however, has raised many issues and taken us back to first principles: examining and re-examining how to handle the Bible, how faith forms and how the things we might take for granted in a real-life physical world might look, in an equally real but virtual digital space.

The project has four key goals:

1 This wouldn’t be a product only for church children. Scripture Union’s passion is to reach those children who have never seen or read the Bible, who have no idea of Jesus or of God’s love.

2 It had to match the quality of successful secular games for children. The graphics had to be great, the game play interesting and compelling and the storytelling strong.

3 Barriers to playing had to be removed as much as possible. An early decision was that it would be free: free to download and free to play.

4 This should be about more than simple story retelling. Scripture Union longs to see children in a relationship with Jesus. Supporting children’s faith formation is embedded within the game.

When I was 10, I went to church three times on Sunday. We had an afternoon Sunday School – with a bus that drove round the streets and gathered children up for the afternoon, delivering them back again later. My world was a few streets and, maybe three times a year, a coach trip to the seaside.

If I was 10 today, what would it be like? I would see myself as a citizen of the world. I would still do that thing where you write your name, address, country, continent, the earth, the solar system, the galaxy, the universe. The difference is that these places would be real and possible – one day I could go there. It is unlikely that I would be in church. But I would be online.

Many would say the biggest, most dramatic change in our lives has been the creation of the World Wide Web, now all of 26 years old. Every day, about 2.5 billion people will use the Web for everything from booking a holiday to sending an email, from gambling to donating to charity. You may well be using it to read this article.

‘Even though young people are sometimes called the “Net Generation”, every age segment is becoming dependent on the Internet.’

Regular research by organisations such as Ofcom, Barna Group, Kaiser Family Foundation and CHILDWISE provides statistics about children’s consumption of media, the types of devices they access and the attitudes of parents to media usage. These show that children’s media use is increasing, that they tend to use more than one medium at a time, that Internet access is high in homes in the UK and the US, and that the take-up of mobile devices has been rapid and is still growing.

Technology is not only about the devices we use but also about how we operate in the digital realm. Learning designer and futurist Marc Prensky clarified the distinction between ‘digital natives’ (those born in the past 20 years or so) and ‘digital immigrants’ (most adults!).

Prensky says that ‘... “digital natives” … think and process information fundamentally differently from their predecessors… They are … “native speakers” of the digital language of computers, video games and the Internet…’

Prensky’s analysis has been challenged and many now prefer to define users of virtual media as: ‘digital inhabitants’ (those who are ‘at home’ in the digital world) and ‘digital visitors’ (those who use digital media to ‘do’ something but not as a reflex). Digital inhabitants – most of today’s children – do just that: they inhabit digital spaces and places, just as they inhabit physical, geographically solid spaces. Digital inhabitants like: receiving information really fast; multi-tasking; graphics more than text; hypertext; being networked; instant gratification and frequent rewards; and they prefer games to ‘serious’ work.

These digital children consume media. Children aged 8–18 have been shown to be using media for an average of 7.38 hours per day, seven days a week; to be using more than one medium or device at a time; and to be consuming 10.75 hours of media content in those 7.38 hours. Every day.

If we’re going to meet children where they are, we must meet them in the digital realm. If we are going to join them in what they’re doing, we must join their gaming, researching, sharing, watching videos, reading books and communicating. Digital is not a substitute for face-to-face ministry. It’s not better than other routes to ministry. It’s not a cure-all for the ills of the church. But the fact that so many children are spending so much time online is an opportunity that only exists because digital media mean we all live in a connected world. ‘Younger adults rely on technology to facilitate their search for meaning and connection…’ The question is not whether digital technology can be useful to spirituality, so much as how best to harness the possibilities on offer.

A game is an interactive experience: this is what sets it apart from other media and is what gives it the potential to be richly engaging and deeply immersive. These qualities of interactivity and immersion are embedded in Scripture Union’s plans to use a game experience, to create an environment for deep and rich engagement in the stories of the Bible. For the child playing Guardians of Ancora, Bible engagement is all about immersiveness: ‘… people with a story to tell are finding: that to tell it, they need not only to entertain their audience but to involve them, invite them in, let them immerse themselves.’

This understanding, as ‘people with a story to tell’, has informed the planning for Guardians of Ancora. Wherever the player is within the online environment, they will be exposed to, and experiencing, biblical values. They may be seeing friends in the virtual city, known as Ancora, where the community values chime with Galatians 5:22,23. They may go on a Bible Quest that takes them through varied adventures to encounter a Bible story, exploring and discovering a key story in the arc of the great story of God and his people, leading them on to rich activities for reflection, worship, response and action. Throughout the experience, the intention is for the game to be contextualising the Bible for these users.

Every element of the experience is designed to have a spiritual and biblical purpose, embedded in such a way to be unobtrusive and ‘natural’ to the player. This is what gives Guardians of Ancora the vital immersive quality, by linking between elements of the game and providing the possibility of the child-player leading their own experience. All the time a child spends with Guardians of Ancora will be time spent engaging with biblical concepts, where there are specific places and occasions where Bible stories and other content are delivered explicitly.

Using a game as a medium for Bible engagement is, however, not without challenges. In a game, the player is an active participant, not a passive observer. This element of choice is not a feature of other media. In a game, there is no audience, as there is for a video or book: the ‘audience’ is interacting and taking part in the experience. ‘When you play a game you want to be the actor, you want to be in the shoes of the guy who is making the decisions so it’s a very different type of experience.’

Players explore through their own choices and this is an empowering experience for them. A great game is about having meaningful choices and the will to choose. Players engage with the game to do something, not simply to be told or shown something. This means that the player makes choices and those choices affect both the game play and the narrative. In reality, it is not feasible to give the player free choice: in a narrative game, there cannot be endless options, opening up like multiple alternate universes. The story-skill is to let the player feel as though a valid choice has been made and the ‘choice’ happens in the act of choosing.

These strengths of interaction and choice present creative tensions when we come to explore Bible stories through games. This is not necessarily a negative quality, but it does need acknowledging. On the one hand, a game means the player is involved, exploring and interacting with the experience: on the other hand, the Bible story cannot be ‘changed’ if it is to be handled with integrity and if the game is to have any credibility. It is crucial not to teach things that a child will have to ‘unlearn’ later – but a game delivers information and narrative in game play, player role, the environment, visuals, character design, dialogue, mini-movies – and, minimally, in words. Games use as little text as possible and expect to tell stories in non-text ways. The games medium, however, lets the player determine and make meaning – a perfect setting for making meaning around Bible stories and faith.

In Guardians of Ancora, we want the player’s engagement with the actual Bible-story content to be as compelling and immersive as in other aspects of the game. This is where concern about biblical accuracy could become such a constraint that the game loses the very qualities of involvement and interaction that we’re striving towards. (These questions are not unique to the game context. For example, is it acceptable to give names to anonymous Bible characters? Is it appropriate to include a description of the weather, or the view from the hillside, on that day when Jesus was preaching?)

There is no shortage of evidence tracking the decline in Bible engagement and suggesting indifference and lack of interest or of a sense of relevance and importance.

Amid the talk of crisis, it became evident that one of the ‘first principles’ to be re-examined was the question of what is meant by the term ‘Bible engagement’. Engagement goes beyond ‘reading’ and ‘literacy’; it’s not the same as ‘study’. Guardians of Ancora is using this working definition:

Bible engagement involves encountering and exploring its events and words, and meeting and experiencing the God who is revealed through them in such a way that the person engaging is: informed about the Bible story and God, and influenced by what they now know; spiritually nurtured and formed as a person of faith; and transformed, personally and socially, in thought, emotions and action.

Engaging with God’s story in this way involves:

• entering actively into the story to see God in action;
• reflecting on the events, on the characters, on God and his ways;
• making meaning, by responding intuitively, emotionally and cognitively; and
• living a new reality that has been shaped by this whole experience.

These forms of engagement, of course, are not limited to technological methods. The world of digital media is, however, a place where all these things can take place – and in immersive, compelling ways. While some people have shied away from the pervasiveness of the Internet, its very ubiquity is an enormous strength. Access is easy and people of all ages are highly motivated to use their devices for learning, entertainment, information and communication.

The digital environment means it is possible to go directly to the ‘consumer’, in this case children, while following clear rules of compliance for creating children’s games. A game can be flexible enough to accommodate and have enough choice and variety for the play and exploration to be child-led and child-controlled. The nature of the medium means that a game can address different learning styles and provide varied activities for auditory, visual and kinaesthetic learners. The possible variety and range of play can connect with children of different and mixed spiritual styles, appealing to those with word, emotion, symbol and action focus in how they express their spirituality.

A key element of creating the right environment for children, to make a real impact, was to invest in understanding how modern day children saw faith, Christianity, the Bible and their own responses.

Spiritual formation does not happen by accident or in isolation. In 2009, the Children’s Society in the UK published the ‘Good Childhood Report’. It was an independent inquiry, over 18 months, with expert panels and many thousands of contributions, including 7,200 adults and 28,000 children and young people. A good childhood, according to the children consulted, has these key factors, in this order: Safety; Care/love; Support/help/someone to talk to; Freedom; Fairness; Respect. These were all seen as ‘spiritual’ and ‘moral’ values. The inquiry concluded that ‘Human beings have always sought … a spiritual dimension which lights up their inner life … the feeling of belonging to something bigger than oneself.’ For a happy life, ‘Children should be helped to develop the spiritual qualities of wonder and inner peace – and the sense of something greater than themselves … No child is complete without some passionate spiritual engagement of this kind.’

What and how children believe is more involved than simply believing what they are told. Researcher Justin L. Barrett (from Fuller Theological Seminary) has been looking into how children are ‘naturally tuned’ to believe in ‘god’ – maybe not God with a big ‘G’, but to have a god-ward awareness. Barrett says: ‘Children learn things that their minds are tuned to learn more readily than things that go against that natural tuning.’ They are predisposed to the idea of a super creator-god. Barrett’s conclusion is that: ‘… children’s minds are not a level playing field. They are tilted in the direction of belief.’

Running parallel to the games development, Scripture Union has invested in a research project into children and faith, to identify signs of that process of informing, forming and transforming. This major work, undertaken by specialists Christian Research, provides a fascinating insight into children today.

This research indicates that:

• The Bible is not on the radar of most 8 to 11-year-olds. They’re not anti, but it never enters their consciousness.
• There is a massive respect for the Bible. One parent talked about his Bible being his most precious possession: everything you need to know for life is there – but he’s never read it. The Bible is of utmost importance – but not something to open or use.
• Parents are not likely to initiate any sort of conversation about a child’s spiritual life. If the child raises it, they will respond – but they are not going to go there by choice. Parents were scrupulous about being honest with their children – so felt all-at-sea when it came to ‘God-things’ because they often did not know what they thought themselves.
• Religious education, as delivered in schools, is said to be uninspiring – but, at the same time, parents saw school as the place where faith nurturing should take place – not in the home, and not even in church.
• The more positive finding was that the children have an instinctive and expectant attitude to prayer and talked openly about times when God has answered their prayer: ‘There’s a little girl at our church now; she’s 5. When she was a baby, she was going to die, and everyone prayed and she’s still alive now…’ and ‘[On the theme park ride,] I was upside down and the ride stopped. I was hanging there and I said “God! Help me!” and the ride started again – and he did.’

In conversations it was found that, although parents felt that they had little or no part to play in teaching their children about faith and the Bible, the children themselves were open to prayer and spirituality. Their view of the Bible, though, is that it is could only be understood by ‘religious, scholarly or older people’.

The study has identified a real disconnect between parents’ attitudes to faith formation and the child’s willingness to learn. This extends into the Bible as, for many children, the Bible is not a part of their life.

Children’s faith formation is not one distinct item: it’s a collection, including:

• prayer as a natural and central part of their lives;
• thinking great thoughts and pondering the mysteries of life;
• experiencing stories imaginatively;
• shared interactions and being part of a community;
• grappling with loss and death – with eight out of ten living with raw experiences – leading them to considering life and death, what happens then and how life can be short…; and
• the longing for someone to trust.

Faith formation is about both the ‘head’ and the ‘heart’: it is imaginative, logical, experiential, reasoning, emotional and factual. It is about the interweaving of deep spiritual encounters with knowledge and understanding. It is about a shift from ‘me, as the centre of my universe’ to ‘relationship with God’.

All this means we can start to identify the ingredients that feed into faith formation. The next stage, for Guardians of Ancora, is to devise ways of noticing those ingredients, gathering them and working out what they mean. Through game metrics, the project will be looking at behaviour, responses and activities; recording attitudes to God, the Bible and Bible stories; whether spiritual transformation takes place; and identifying self-discovery and God-discovery.

In all of this, we recognise the value of the church, support networks, crucial friends and, for many children, their families in bringing people to Christ. It was always important that, alongside the storytelling and game play, we offer a safe place for children to explore their own faith and reflect on the impact of the stories, and how that may affect them outside of the game. We encourage children to write their own prayers, to be creative designing pictures using stickers and familiar paint tools which they can share with those people known to them. Where children have adults in their lives who are keen to support their spiritual lives, further help and ideas are available through a ‘family hub’ on the Guardians of Ancora website.

Christians through the centuries have been shrewd in using the latest equipment to promote faith, whether it was writing on a codex instead of a scroll, or adopting the printing press. Digital technology is today’s equivalent opportunity. The story of Guardians of Ancora is not complete. Month on month, more stories and activities are being added. And month on month, Scripture Union continues to look at the possibilities and test and experiment with what it means to express faith and spirituality in the digital realm.