Mess

We've been doing Messy Church at Swanvale Halt for a couple of years now. If you're not familiar with this concept, it's a way of providing some religious input for families who may not have a close relationship with the church, but move on the periphery - the sort who will come to Mothering Sunday and Harvest Festival but not much else. The way we work it, we pick a theme, people come and do various sorts of craft stuff connected with that theme, then we go into church for a bit of undemanding worship, and finally back into the hall again for tea. I suppose it's 'messy' not just because of the activities but because you don't know what's going to happen. One of the nice things is that because our volunteers tend to be older, and parents definitely do NOT leave their children and go off elsewhere, you get a splendid cross-generational mix. we've built up quite a number of regulars, but on the last couple of occasions numbers have been down a bit. Law of diminishing returns, I thought as we opened up on Saturday afternoon and a trickle of people came in. But that trickle turned into a total of 85 souls of whom about 45 were children, rather more than came to Mass the following day.

Fr Robin Ward, principal of my old vicar school, has written a book on Christian priesthood which recently outsold the latest volume of Messy Church on Amazon. He put this amusing news on his Facebook profile. Another priest commented, 'I don't do Messy Church, I do real church'. Well, Solemn High Mass is certainly easier for people like me who like order and structure, and to whom designing worship that will mean something to small children and unchurched people doesn't come easily. But, I thought, with an attitude like that you won't be 'doing' any kind of church in twenty years time.

The Eucharist (which I suppose this priest means by 'real church') is indeed the core and heart of the Church. More than anything else it shows us what God is like and brings us face to face with Jesus. It should be grand and glorious, and at Swanvale Halt I do my level best to make it so. But the truth is that very many people aren't ready to be dumped into the middle of Solemn High Mass, and perhaps they never will be. Provided somebody is doing it, I'm rather relaxed about that, and will do anything I attitudinally can do to provide people with avenues down which to find their way to God, short of making worship a circus. Messy Church is quite definitely not circus-like. The children are proud of the work they do and when we go into church we aim at reverence. We lit the candles on the old benediction candelabrum on Saturday to pray, and you'd never believe over forty small children could be so silent. There are questions to be asked about how those seeds of faith can be encouraged, but for a lot of the people there, Messy Church is 'real church', which is how it's supposed to be.