First Messy Church of the Year

Our Messy Church began just before I arrived in Swanvale Halt, relatively early as our then curate had worked for the Diocesan Education Department and heard about it that way: now virtually every church does Messy. Ours has waxed and waned over the course of the last nearly-nine years and now seems to be waxing again – in fact, we had more souls attending last week than ever before, nearly 90. The theme this time was Creation, and thankfully I attracted less flak for my take on the subject than I did on the previous occasion I tackled it, at Harvest Festival in October.

I’ve always taken the line that the Creation story in Genesis is pretty good guess for a Bronze Age civilization, and in fact far closer to what we know the development of the Earth was actually like than any other ancient mythological account. While thinking about what I might say for the talk, it suddenly occurred to me that the ‘creation of light and darkness’ – God’s work on the First Day – could be read as the creation of order, which is why it predates the appearance of the Sun and Moon (or, more precisely, the ‘greater light to govern the day and the lesser light to govern the night’) on the Fourth Day. The ‘separation of the waters from the waters’ on the Second Day can be interpreted as the generation of the elements, the building materials for life; and the anomalous appearance of vegetation on the Third Day makes sense if the first life-forms didn’t appear on Earth, but, as many scientists believe, were transported here by meteorites, perhaps from a vast distance, thus predating the arrival of the Sun and Moon. We might one day discover that Genesis is more truthful than it appears, albeit containing a truth garbled, bent and buckled.

Apparently several families experienced tummy upsets in the days following Messy Church. I had my usual doggy-bag of sandwiches and cake to take home and suffered no such ill effects, so I hope our kitchen will retain its star-rating from the Council.