Messy Church and Church Growth

A message from Lucy Moore, Messy Church Team Leader at BRF. Recorded on 1 June 2015

What is Messy Church?

Messy Church is a once a month church for families and others. It’s huge fun. It usually consists of a warm welcome, an hour of hands-on, varied, free-range activities to explore a Bible theme or story; a short celebration with story, song and prayer and a sit down meal for everyone. It’s very definitely for all ages, not just for children; is for those who don’t already belong to a church and happens in about three thousand churches across the UK and about 20 other countries. There are Messy Churches of all Christian denominations. It is one of the ministries of The Bible Reading Fellowship (BRF).

What Messy Church won’t do

Messy Churches are popping up everywhere from the most rural hamlet in Hampshire to the most multicultural inner city parish in Birmingham. But nobody is claiming that it’s easy to run; nor are they claiming that it’s the answer to all the Church’s problems. What won’t Messy Church do?

It won’t fill your church on a Sunday: we need to accept that a Messy Church is a new congregation, not a stepping stone into Sunday morning church. The families and others who come are worshipping God in a different way but it’s an equally valid way. Sunday morning church may well not be the ‘next step’ in their discipleship – it might even be a step backwards.

It won’t turn people into Christians overnight. It is highly unlikely that your Messy families will come for a month and then be begging to join the baptism preparation class or indeed the planned giving scheme. The church door has been flung wide open for your Messy Church, and families have come in, but that in itself is a massive journey for many of them. There’s a very long pilgrimage to make before they come to the point of commitment. And like the parable of the Sower, it’s going to take an awful lot of apparently pointless seed-sowing before you reach the ‘good soil’.

Other things Messy Church won’t do? It won’t trash your church building, bankrupt you, lead people to disrespect the things of faith or cause your present services and children’s work to dwindle and die.

What Messy Church might do

What we need to be clear about here is that where God works through his Spirit, in or out of his church, the work will be of eternal worth. Where it’s merely our human efforts, we might as well be building with marshmallows. It might be great social enterprise and huge fun, but in spiritual terms, in terms of what will outlast the mountains and the seas, church without God will only ever be a clanging gong or a resounding cymbal. So Messy Church in itself is nothing but a way of making space - a space where God can (and does) act. All the power comes from him and from his Spirit at work in our own lives; all we do is join in with what he’s already doing in the lives of families.

But given this reminder, which is so easy to forget, what might happen through Messy Church?

It might make space for God to change individuals – that wide open door of your church encourages outsiders to come in and gives them a chance to love and be loved, to explore and question, to watch and notice and belong little by little. A mum at a Messy Church in South Wales spent her first two months there standing by the door watching before she was happy to join in. It can be a space to grow trust and overcome prejudices about Jesus and about his church.

Messy Church might be a space for God to change families and bring about healing on many levels. I remember one woman who was helping for the first time at a Messy Church on the theme of ‘Our Family; God’s Family’. In the prayer time before the session, she found herself wondering about her relationship with her mother… and picking up the phone to her after years of not speaking. They are now reconciled, in part through God’s still small voice during a prayer time she would never otherwise have had a reason to attend, not being a Christian or, up to that point, a churchgoer.

Messy Church might make space for God to change churches. This will be uncomfortable. Doing church differently leads many of us to challenge and query aspects of church that may have been accepted as ‘givens’, and ask ‘Who wrote the rule that…?’It also questions power and ownership: and makes us ask, ‘Whose church is this anyway?’ Do these newcomers have the same rights and responsibilities as those who have been coming for the last fifty years? What does real hospitality mean?

It may also change attitudes to church in the society around us. One Messy Church leader overheard the family at the next table in the pub at lunchtime – ‘Could you hurry up with the dessert? We don’t want to miss Messy Church.’ The leader laughed: ‘It made me realise Messy Church is cool!’

It might also make space for God to change us, the team members, It may turn cruise passengers into crew members on a lifeboat, space tourists into astronauts on a mission…Messy Church might give the team encouragement to use their gifts in God’s service… freedom to welcome outsiders to the building they love and more importantly into the faith family they treasure. ‘You know that man who was asking all the questions?’ said a minister to me at a training evening, ‘Six months ago he would never have been that engaged spiritually. Being on the Messy team has brought his faith alive.’It might also give your church energy and joy, hope and rejuvenation, like the family of Abraham and Sarah when they finally had a new child. Most team members come home from Messy Church each month saying something like, ‘I’m exhausted… but it was worth it!’

Of course this often lay-led ministry also might unintentionally allow people to build unhelpful power bases and empires. It might upset those who have very strong fixed views about what church should be. It might take the focus off the needs of those within the church and focus on the needs of those outside the church: none of this will be welcome.

What will give it the best chance of succeeding?

We need to find ways to acknowledge that this is God’s work, not ours. Prayer and conversation around the Bible passage of the theme are probably the best ways of doing this.

We need to make a habit of intentionally noticing God at work in the smallest and largest of ways and never taking his miracles of transformation for granted.

We should relish growing a fantastic team of all ages, encouraging the very youngest to use their gifts as well as the very oldest; including men, women, children and teenagers to be great Christian role models. We need shared ownership and self-denying love so that challenges and opportunities are confronted together and everyone grows in Christ through them.

We should give the five Messy values a robust trial to see why so much emphasis is placed on being Christ-centred, all-age, creative, hospitable and celebratory.

Whatever our private reservations are about ecclesiology, we need to treat Messy Church as though it were church – perhaps the only time this month that many of these families will hear Jesus mentioned as something other than a swearword. The only time they may hear the Bible being taken seriously. The only time they will be actively encouraged to pray and worship. The only time anyone takes their spirituality seriously. These are encouragements church can do well.

And we need to work very hard at every aspect of team relationships, publicity, reflective practice that always affirms and is grateful but is never smugly content with the status quo. We need both challenge and encouragement to grow closer to God ourselves, and for Messy Church to be church for us too, not church that we simply, smugly and safely do to others.

Conclusion

Messy Church isn’t really intended to grow the Church primarily, but to grow Kingdom in the lives of families and teams, - that unpredictable wild weed of a mustard tree that could end up very different from all our plans. This might have the secondary effect of growing the Church, but will be a result not an aim.

We don’t know what will happen with Messy Church in the future and can only be faithful and full of integrity for the present, so the future is built on good foundations. Or, to mix metaphors, to let the wheat and the weeds grow up together and allow the Lord of the Harvest to work out how to bring the harvest home.

Ultimately it’s not about an efficient team, great plans or perfect buildings: Messy Church is about making space for God to meet people. If he chooses to grow his churchin this unpredictable and messy way, all we can do is roll up our sleeves, laugh and join in.

Lucy Moore Messy Church team leader at BRF (The Bible Reading Fellowship)

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