The 100th Messy Church!

Anna Biddlecombe - Oxfordshire - 27 March 2009

We are very excited to be the 100th Messy Church to register and really appreciate being part of the Messy Church family! As I write we are in the throes of planning our 4th Messy Church in Carterton and are very much looking forward to some Easter messiness! We ran and advertised our first Messy Church session as a trial in December last year and were delighted by the enthusiastic response from those who came along and decided that perhaps we had heard God right and Messy Church was a way forward for us to begin to see the lives of our friends and others in the town touched and changed by Him! We decided then to go for it and do Messy Church once a month after school on a Wednesday.

Our team is a relatively small number of women (6) with help from our very willing husbands as and when they can! We mostly met doing an Alpha course a couple of years ago which continued as a church housegroup and as we grew together as a group and as Christians we felt that we wanted to do something in our community to help our friends with children manage to get to church and enjoy it! We talked about things we enjoyed doing and what kind of shape that something might look like and as we talked I remembered seeing Messy Church on the Fresh Expressions DVD and thought it could help us shape our something!

We googled 'Messy Church' , stayed up far too late talking about it all and went away excited to prayer about it! Several months later here we are we three months worth of Messy Church under our belts! Many of the team are new to leading anything and have found it a challenge but have tackled it with faith, prayer and a willingness to get stuck in which has been a huge blessing to me and to the Messy Churchers!

We had nearly 60 in total at our last Messy Church and are already reaching the point where we need to think creatively about how to use the team and the space available to us to best build relationships with those who are coming! Its a good challenge to be facing!

Our church, Carterton Community Church, part of Oxfordshire Comunity Churches, is itself a relatively new church plant and has been very supportive of Messy Church seeing it as a vital part of our being church in our town. We meet in our local Methodist church which is in the centre of our small Oxfordshire town, best known for being home to RAF Brize Norton.

Our Messy Church sessions pretty much follow suggestions from the Messy Church book which in itself has made the whole venture so much more manageable for us (thank you!). As we have no musicians on the team (and non we can borrow either!), we use Hillsongs Kids DVDs projected onto a big screen for our singing during worship times. This is our only major 'innovation' and seems to be appreciated by the children and parents alike!

One of my best Messy Church moments has been children asking to sing our 'theme' song 'One Way Jesus' and hearing a mum and daughter comment on how great it is and singing it together at the top of their voices! Now all the team has to do is work on actually learning the actions, although I am sure our lack of co-ordination adds something to the worship and hopefully makes God smile!!

We thank God helping us to find something that does seem to be touching lives of those who come and we pray that He will continue to draw people closer to Him through the Messy Churches across our country and beyond.