About Us
This project is a collaboration between the Rev’d Megan Jull, Parish Priest, and Marcus Reinkeluers, Music Director, both serving at the Church of St. Augustine of Canterbury, an Anglican Church in the Leaside neighbourhood of Toronto. It is inspired by the work of Douglas Cowling and generously funded by a grant in his memory, the Douglas C. Cowling Bursary for Liturgical Music. Megan and Marcus have been informally using Doug’s works since 2018 and adding to the collection. With bursary support, they decided to build a resource to publish these materials and help equip the broader Church.
Megan and Doug first met via mutual friends in the late 1990s and got to know one another better through the Folk Masses at St. Mary Magdalene’s, Toronto. In 2002, Megan began Divinity School and Doug urged her to choose Church of the Messiah, Toronto, where he was Director of Music and Liturgical Arts, for her field education components. For some five years, they worked shoulder to shoulder and created a variety of playful liturgy options to better engage the children of the parish. Together, they discovered that more often than not, the adults of the parish also enjoyed this playful, yet reverent style.
While their careers took different paths in 2007, they remained close friends. Doug was a mentor to Megan and helped shape her for the priesthood. They continued to consult and collaborate on projects until Doug’s untimely death in 2017.
Doug inspired Megan (and many others) with his love of big, generous, symbols. Doug’s playfulness, creativity, and musical gifts have helped bring many people, regardless of age or background, to the Christian faith. He was passionate about restoring elements of catholic liturgy to our worship and he could envision imaginative and interactive ways to bring the stories of our faith to life. He supported this work musically, often composing and arranging custom accompanying musical scores.
Doug and Megan were introduced to Godly Play by friend and colleague, the Rev’d Canon Dr. Andrew Sheldon, who was the parish priest at Church of the Messiah in Toronto until 2006. Godly Play, crafted by Jerome Berryman, is a Montessori inspired faith formation method that uses small props to tell scripture stories to children. Together, Doug, Megan, and Andrew imagined ways to incorporate this storytelling method into the liturgy, using big, generous symbols. Many of the elements here at Playful Liturgy draw inspiration from this work and Godly Play continues to inspire new stories and dramas published here.
In 2025, Megan was accepted into the Doctor of Ministry program at Trinity College, in the Toronto School of Theology. Playful Liturgy will form the bulk of her dissertation research. She intends to study the use of this material in various church settings, asking if Playful Liturgy might be an effective way to incorporate principles of Universal Design for Learning into our worship life as Church. As such, much of this material will undergo vigorous field testing.
Megan and Marcus have shared Doug’s musical legacy with St. Augustine’s and aim to build upon it by crafting new works together and sharing the resources more broadly. We hope you are similarly inspired by the use of big, generous symbols in the worship life of your church and that this resource can help you offer worship that is playful, yet reverent, engaging the tall and small in the greatest story ever told.
To reach the creators of Playful Liturgy contact us at info@playfulliturgy.com