Messy Church – 18 months report

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…