Escape Rooms Get Religion: Churches Turning Puzzles Into Faith Journeys
LONDON — Move over history, crime and literature. Escape room themes featuring faith and the Bible are taking over.
Churches and social groups are turning to this popular leisure activity and using it to challenge people to think about spirituality, life and even their connections with science.
The basic idea of using escape rooms to challenge and develop faith is not new. In Christ Church in Winchester, Youth, Children and Families Director, Dave Thornton, turned to escape rooms during the COVID-19 lockdowns.
“We wanted to do something a bit different and fun, so we made our first virtual escape room, with Breakout rooms on Zoom led by a leader with a shared PowerPoint. You solved puzzles, spot the difference pictures, riddles and codes in order to move onto the next area and were timed to see how long you took to finish all the escape rooms. It gave a lot of joy at a difficult time,” Thornton said.
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Recognizing an opportunity, Thornton set out to develop the concept, creating Bible-based escape rooms that could be used in group settings, face to face or online, by families, church and social groups.
“The idea was to tell Bible stories,” he said. “Participants met characters from Bible stories and were set a challenge. It could be a Roman Centurion trying to work out why he was there under the Cross, or questioning Barabbas on what he had done and why. People would have a map of Jerusalem and have to go from place to place, learning the story connected with each place, and only move on if you solve the problem each time.”
The range now includes topics like Holy Week, Easter, Cathedral Pursuits and Christmas. There is also one based on Psalm 139, focusing on the issues raised line by line, linked with the issues that people encounter in life.
There is even a cathedral offering an escape room. Hereford Cathedral, part of the Church of England, has turned one of the rooms within its cloisters into an actual escape room inspired by its own hidden histories discovered in the archives, highlighting dastardly deeds of embezzlement.
Designed to attract a younger audience and families who might not otherwise visit the cathedral, it has proved extremely popular. The Cathedral is already on its second storyline.
Gemma Wagner, a scientist, is the latest to explore the possibilities of this concept. As a member of King’s Church Warrington, she noticed that although there are many scientists in the area, relatively few go to church.
“I asked myself why this is. Many scientists think that science and faith are not compatible,” she said. “In reality, there is a lot of common ground. Science questions everything and is very experimental. When you are experiencing faith, you are doing exactly the same thing.”
Through her work as a scientist, she encountered the Equipping Christian Leadership in an Age of Science project, which offers some funding for special projects. With the backing of her church pastor, Wagner successfully applied to develop an escape room project called Lightbreak that could be used by families, churches and youth meetings.
“The project is to develop an escape room bringing both science and faith into the same room,” Wagner said. “To encourage groups to spend technology-free time together. The escape room creates a ‘sandbox’ type environment where people across the spectrum of beliefs about the compatibility of science and faith can find something they are familiar with, but then experiment and play around with different concepts at their own pace and form their own connections between science and faith.”
Wagner said that in a “busy world, we all need a ‘light break’ occasionally to recharge us and the fun nature of escape rooms allows us to do that. Also, the purpose of this escape room is to release mobile phones locked away in a box at the start of the activity, so is it more important that we break out that source of digital light, or to allow light to ‘break in’ illuminating concepts in new ways?”
Throughout the escape room, there are numerous linked questions and hands-on, practical, experimental-based tasks. Everything has a theological connection with overlaps between science and faith.
Once the escape room activity is over, participants are invited to reflect on their findings at a more relaxed pace, using additional events to explore digital technology usage and communication skills.
Judging by the reactions of participants, religion-based escape rooms are certainly proving popular. Thornton tries out all the escape rooms on his youth groups before listing them on the website, where groups from not just the U.K., but elsewhere have been picking them up, with the most recent being a youth group from the United States.
Angela Youngman is a freelance journalist who has written for a wide range of British and international publications.