Messy Church – 18 months report

Yay for new things!

Nick Brindley's avatarLove's Work

mc_alllogos When I arrived here into my first pastoral charge one of the projects my predecessors had begun was an experiment with Messy Church. In one of the two churches this had had  very limited success but in the other some real progress had been made, not least in the enthusiastic participation and leadership of two members of the congregation. These two women, but with children in the target age range, were planning and leading the sessions very competently. In the circumstances it made good sense to continue with the experiment.

The main respect in which this differed from the classic Messy Church format, as described in Lucy Moore’s excellent books was that it was not monthly. Monthly sessions felt like too much of a burden for the two busy mothers who were the mainstay of our programme. Instead we had an ad-hoc schedule at more or less six weekly intervals. Numbers weren’t…

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Author: katyandtheword

Pastor Katy has enjoyed ministry at New Covenant since 2010, where the church has solidified its community focus. She now works at Capital CFO plus as the Non Profit Director. All opinions expressed on this blog are her own and do not reflect those of Capital CFO plus. Prior to that she studied both Theology and Christian Formation at Princeton Theological Seminary. She also served as an Assistant Chaplain at Trenton Psychiatric Hospital and as the Christian Educational Coordinator at Bethany Presbyterian at Bloomfield, NJ. She is an writer and is published in Enfleshed, Sermonsuite, Presbyterian's today and Outlook. She writes prayers, liturgy, poems and public theology and is pursuing her doctorate in ministry in Creative Write and Pittsburgh Theological Seminary. She enjoys working within and connecting to the community, is known to laugh a lot during service, and tells as many stories as possible. Pastor Katy loves reading Science Fiction and Fantasy, theater, arts and crafts, music, playing with children and sunshine, and continues to try to be as (w)holistically Christian as possible. "Publisher after publisher turned down A Wrinkle in Time," L'Engle wrote, "because it deals overtly with the problem of evil, and it was too difficult for children, and was it a children's or an adult's book, anyhow?" The next year it won the prestigious John Newbery Medal. Tolkien states in the foreword to The Lord of the Rings that he disliked allegories and that the story was not one.[66] Instead he preferred what he termed "applicability", the freedom of the reader to interpret the work in the light of his or her own life and times.

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