Not long ago, a student stopped by my office and tried to explain why she felt so tired. Classes were fine, her grades were fine, her part time job was fine. But then she said, almost in passing, “I just feel like if I am not useful, I should not be here.”

She meant the university, but the sentence was bigger than that. It could have meant the church, her family, even her life. I heard in her voice a quiet creed of our age: I am what I can contribute. When I am useful, I belong. When I am not, I am in the way.

We rarely say it that bluntly, but many of us live as if usefulness were the deepest truth about a person. We measure ourselves by productivity and efficiency. We judge days by what we “got done.” Even in ministry and church life we can slip into this same calculus and simply baptize it. A “strong” Christian is a busy Christian, a visible Christian, a Christian who is always serving on one more committee.

Beneath all of this sits a very thin doctrine of the human person. It is functional at its core. You are what you can do.

Scripture, thankfully, begins somewhere else.

Before there is any talk of human work, before there is any garden to tend, there is a strange and gentle scene: a world already made and a human creature opening its eyes inside that world. Genesis does not report a first day at the office. It reports light and land, trees and stars, living things that move of their own accord. Only then, near the end of the sixth day, a man and a woman shaped from dust and breath. They arrive late to a world that is already singing.

God does give them a task. There is a garden to keep, a world to rule, names to give. Work is not a punishment. Yet the first word spoken over this new humanity is not a job description. It is delight. Over and over God has said, “It is good.” When humanity appears, the language intensifies: “very good.”

That verdict does not wait to see how useful we will be. It is spoken before anyone has accomplished anything at all.

If the modern creed says, “You are what you can do,” the first chapter of scripture says, “You are what God delights in.” That is the foundation. Everything else is built on top of this older, deeper word.

Beloved before useful

This pattern is echoed later in the story, at the Jordan River. Before Jesus preaches, before he heals, before he gathers disciples, he steps into the water. The heavens open, and the Father says, “You are my beloved Son; with you I am well pleased.”

From a utilitarian point of view, this makes no sense. Jesus has not yet “produced” anything. No crowds, no miracles, no cross, no resurrection. If usefulness were God’s main concern, this affirmation is premature. Yet this is how the story begins. Belovedness comes first, not as a reward for performance but as a starting point.

In the New Testament’s own language, that verdict is extended to those who belong to Christ. We are adopted, justified, reconciled. We stand in grace, not in our own record. In Reformed terms, this is not sentimental warmth; it is the hard theology of justification by faith. God pronounces a verdict on us that is not based on our usefulness but on Christ’s faithfulness.

That means something very concrete for daily life. If the deepest thing about me is that I am beloved in Christ, then usefulness is relativized. It is no longer the basis of my worth, only one way of responding to grace. When belovedness moves from doctrine to reality, the space for play slowly opens.

Play is difficult for those who live as if their existence must constantly be justified. If I must prove that I deserve my place, then every hour must count, every activity must yield something measurable. Under that pressure, play will always look suspicious, maybe even sinful.

But if belovedness truly comes first, then there can be time that is not justified by efficiency, time that is not bent toward output. There can be meals that do not have an agenda, walks that lead nowhere, games that leave nothing behind except laughter and a few bruises. These “useless” moments are not escapes from reality. They are moments where reality is finally allowed to rest on its true foundation.

Imago Dei: more than a tool

The functional view of humanity that dominates our culture has a quiet but sharp edge. It raises a simple question: what, then, of the people who are not obviously useful?

What of the child with profound disabilities who will never hold a job, the elder whose memory has frayed, the chronically ill neighbor whose “productivity” has shrunk to almost nothing? If we measure human worth by usefulness, these lives become ethical problems. We have to work hard to explain why they still “matter.”

The doctrine of the imago Dei refuses to start there. To bear God’s image is not a description of capacity. It is a description of relationship. Human beings are made to reflect God’s character, to live before God’s face, to be addressed by God’s word. That calling does include action, but it does not depend on a neat list of achievements.

One way to say it is this: God did not create tools and then try to love them; God created images to whom he could give himself. The command to fill and subdue the earth rests on top of this more basic reality. We are wanted before we are useful.

Play is one of the places where that truth is embodied. In honest play, we do not ask, “What can this person do for me?” We do not evaluate return on investment. We stand side by side or across a table or on a field and simply share time. We discover, in a very ordinary way, that it is good that this other person exists, quite apart from their skills.

That is why play with those our culture deems “unproductive” can be so holy. Sitting on the floor with a child who does not speak, rolling a ball back and forth, following the wandering stories of someone with dementia, listening to their repetition and responding without impatience, these are not efficient acts. They are small confessions that the image of God is not erased by weakness, slowness, or loss. They are acts of resistance against usefulness as the final measure of a life.

Belonging that does not depend on performance

Belovedness is God’s word over us. Imago Dei is God’s design in us. Belonging is what happens when those truths begin to shape our life together.

If usefulness is the hidden god of a congregation, belonging becomes fragile. People are celebrated when they can serve, when they are energetic, when they show up whenever something needs doing. Those who cannot, or no longer can, quietly drift to the edges. They still come, but their presence feels marginal, even to themselves. They sit in the back and slip out before the coffee is poured.

This can happen in very healthy churches, with good preaching and sincere faith, simply because the cultural air of usefulness has not been challenged.

Play can become one of the ways the church learns a different language of belonging. When a church picnic is not merely an outreach event but a space where children, teens, exhausted parents, and elders can simply be together, chasing balls, spilling drinks, laughing at nothing in particular, something more than entertainment is going on. The community is practicing a kind of non-utilitarian presence.

The same could be true of a weekly game night around board games, or a choir rehearsal that includes, besides careful work, space to joke and relax, or a retreat where part of the schedule is intentionally unstructured and nobody is made to feel guilty for resting. These forms of play say to each person, in quiet ways, “You do not have to earn your chair. You are welcome here in failure and fatigue. You do not have to be at your best to belong.”

Of course, the church’s belonging is grounded in more than shared experiences. It is grounded in baptism, in being joined to Christ and to one another in his body. Yet shared play can help that deeper reality move from abstraction into muscle and memory. It is a way the Spirit may train us to see one another as gifts rather than as resources.

Play as a lived critique of usefulness

For many of us, the hardest thing about play is not finding time or opportunities. It is allowing ourselves to enter it without secretly turning it back into work. We keep score too fiercely. We make family vacations into carefully curated experiences. We turn hobbies into side jobs.

The Sabbath tradition of Israel pushes in another direction. Judith Shulevitz describes Sabbath as a weekly interruption in which “the machinery of self-justification” is allowed to halt for a day.[1] While her language is more sociological than doctrinal, her insight is deeply compatible with a Reformed understanding of grace. Sabbath time is not time we must defend. It is time we receive.

Healthy play can be a kind of Sabbath in miniature. It interrupts usefulness. It gives us small rehearsals in not needing to defend our existence. We put our devices down, we stop tracking every minute, and we taste, if only for a short while, what it means to live as creatures rather than as projects.

Some writers on play emphasize its contribution to brain development, creativity, or problem solving.[2] Those are valuable observations, but from a Christian point of view they are not the main point. If we play in order to become more productive, we have smuggled usefulness back in through the side door.

The more radical claim is that play has value because life itself is more than usefulness. Play is good because belonging is good, because joy is good, because God delights in his creatures. Jürgen Moltmann’s small book on the theology of play makes exactly this point. He argues that if the coming kingdom is sheer festivity in God’s presence, then play here and now is a sign of that future, a way the present is opened up by joy.[3]

In that sense, play is not just a break from the serious business of life. It is a serious protest against a world that wants to flatten everything into production. It is a form of embodied critique, written not in manifestos but in laughter and shared time.

Learning again to walk with God

None of this means we can escape work. Work remains a central part of human calling. The point is not to swing from usefulness to irresponsibility. The point is to relocate usefulness inside a larger frame: belovedness, image, and belonging.

If I know that I am beloved in Christ, I can work hard without trying to save myself by my effort. If I know that the image of God marks my neighbor, I can resist treating them as a tool. If I know that belonging in the body of Christ is not based on energy level or ability, I can welcome those who are weak without embarrassment or condescension.

Play does not add new doctrines to this. It gives those doctrines a body. It is, in that sense, almost sacramental, not in the technical sense, but in the everyday sense of making grace visible and tangible.

Here is a simple image I carry. Genesis tells us that God was “walking in the garden in the cool of the day” (3:8) when fear and shame drove Adam and Eve to hide. That was after the fall. Yet I cannot help imagining, with all proper caution, that before sin entered, this walk was a daily joy. Not a performance review, not a patrol, but a stroll. Creator and creatures side by side, pointing at birds, watching light change, unhurried.

To play before the face of God is to move, for a moment, back toward that lost walk. It is to trust that, in Christ, God is not pacing the garden with a clipboard but seeking his children. It is to let usefulness step aside and allow belovedness to breathe.

Maybe this is one way the church can bear quiet witness in a tired age. Not only through arguments or strategies, but through communities where people sometimes simply sit on the grass together, throw balls, tell stories, sing, and rest.

In such places, the question that haunted my student, “Am I useful enough to be here?” may slowly give way to another, older sentence.

“It is good that you are here.”

That sentence is not ours to invent. It is borrowed from the God who said “very good” over creation, from the Father who called the Son beloved at the river, from the Spirit who joins us to Christ and to each other. To say it, and then to live it in work and in play, is to remember what we were made for. Not usefulness first, but belovedness, belonging, and the quiet, risky joy of bearing the image of God.

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Notes

[1] Judith Shulevitz, The Sabbath World: Glimpses of a Different Order of Time (New York: Random House, 2010).

[2] Stuart Brown and Christopher Vaughan, Play: How It Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination, and Invigorates the Soul (New York: Avery, 2009).

[3] Jürgen Moltmann, Theology of Play, trans. Reinhard Ulrich (New York: Harper & Row, 1975).

[4] Kevin M. Gushiken, A Theology of Play: Learning to Enjoy Life as God Intended (Grand Rapids, MI: Kregel, 2024).

[5] Brock Henderson, “A Theology of Play,” Faith Forms: Christianity Shapes Game Development, n.d.