Return to Mess

Messy Church in March 2020 was the last special event we staged before the first lockdown, going ahead only after a lot of indecision. We'd cut our activities down to Sunday services alone after that, I'd already decided before the decision was taken out of our hands. As anxiety and uncertainty swirled around, many people said how good it was to do something 'normal'; and they said that again on Saturday as Swanvale Halt Messy Church met for the first time since then. The team had decided on the theme of the Good Shepherd, which suited me as I'd done that four years ago and so could virtually recycle what I did then (none of the twenty children who came this time had been there in 2017). We asked people to confirm they were coming beforehand: only one did, meaning we set the bar of expectations comfortingly low, and the fact that we had a reasonable number of attenders goes to show how hard it is to expect families with small children to plan anything at all. Reasonable: but still on the low side compared with what we are used to. I wonder whether the Messy model will have to rebuild as much as any other aspect of our Church life.