Getting Messy: A New Kind of Church

A fresh kind of church is springing up all over the country. It involves families, food, paint, glue and lots of mess - and it is not on a Sunday. Rebecca Paveley explores the phenomenon.

ON a warm Saturday afternoon in a town in Berkshire, families are gathering in a school for activities, food and worship. It’s a new kind of church – Messy Church. Aimed at families who only have contact with church perhaps via their child’s school, or maybe have no contact at all, Messy Church has been tremendously successful in other areas of the country.

The idea began in a housing estate in Portsmouth, and is championed by the children’s arm of the Bible Reading Fellowship.

‘Messy’ means both physically messy – there are lots of craft activities on offer after all – and also the untidy or fuzzy edges of ‘church’, explains Lucy Moore, one of Messy Church’s founders. The concept is aimed at people on this fuzzy or outer edge of church.

Back in Thatcham, Berkshire, the Revd Pete Jarvis hopes the innovative project will catch on here as it has elsewhere.

He works in St Barnabas, a church plant run from a primary school. The area around the school is one of deprivation.

‘The area where we are working is an area of urban deprivation, which people don’t imagine exists in somewhere like Thatcham,’ he explained. ‘There are high numbers of one parent families and we were looking at how we could reach out and connect with these families. We wanted something different that could really engage with them.’

After reading the book on Portsmouth’s experiment with Messy Church, the ministry team in Thatcham decided to put the concept to work at St Barnabas.

Pete said the first session, which was tied in with Valentine’s Day, was really intended as a trial but more than 40 people still turned up.

‘The impetus to do something came because a number of people to do with school said they were interested in coming to church but couldn’t do Sundays because of family commitments. So we’ve gone for 4.30 in the afternoon on a Saturday, a time when we hope families might be free to spend time together and eat together with us.’

The idea of having food together is both scriptural and an extremely important part of the process. For families who may not often eat together in the week, it is a chance to do just that, as well as to talk. The food is kept simple – the latest session had a seaside theme so hotdogs, doughnuts and choc ices were on offer.

In Portsmouth, as in other Messy Churches around the country, families are encouraged to make a donation to the cost of the food.

But Pete has decided against that. ‘We aren’t going to ask people to donate money, we see it as part of our serving the community and the money will come from donations from our congregation.’

This year, the project is going to run once every school term. ‘We were originally hoping for once a month but  that is a bit beyond us at the moment, so we’ve gone for termly.’

He has a team of between six and ten people to help run the variety of craft activities on offer. Each session will offer different activities for everyone, from toddlers to grandparents, based around the theme.

Pete knows exactly where he wants to go with the project. ‘In the first year or so I am hoping to gradually draw in some families who come to see church as fun and different and not just sitting in a pew listening to the vicar... We want to develop relationships with people and have spiritual conversations. We also hope to build it up to do it more often.’

But the aim of Messy Church is very definitely not to act as a stepping stone to ‘Sunday’ church.
‘I’ll be happy if people come on to Sunday church but I’ll be equally happy if they just stay with Messy Church. If that is their way of accessing the church, that is great and we will work with that. What we are about is bringing God to people where they are at now,’ he added.

• Lucy Moore has written a book, ‘Messy Church’, explaining the concept and bursting with ideas for churches to have a go themselves. It is published by brf and costs £8.99.

If you or your church would be interested in setting up a ‘Messy Church’ for families, there are two workshops, called Messy fiestas, in our diocese this year, on Saturday 28 June at St James Church, Southlake, Reading, and on Saturday 27 September at St Matthew’s Church, Oxford. Both ask ‘What is ‘Messy Church’? Is it something my church can do?’ .

Contact the churches for details.