Analysing Mess

Dr Abacus would, I’m sure, warn all of us that we should pay attention to facts and figures and not our own vague impressions of things. Our recent Messy Church gatherings have been very modestly attended, and my recollection had been that this was quite a long-term phenomenon. But on actually tabulating the figures ahead of a staff team meeting where I wanted to mention it, I found that this wasn’t really the case. We’ve been holding Messy Church events since just before I arrived at Swanvale Halt in 2009 and in this graph you can see how widely attendance has varied: the top line shows the highest attendance of children in each year, the bottom one the lowest, and the one in the middle the mean attendance for all the gatherings in the year concerned. In 2011, 2016 and 2018 the bottom figure is less than half the top one, and it’s very hard to discern the reason why it varies quite so much; some Messy Churches were very sparse, though I think the one in May 2016 only attracted 16 children because I’d forgotten to tell anyone it was happening, so it was a marvel that we had a soul there at all.

The graph shows that the figures for the last few years before the pandemic were not, in fact, declining at all, but experienced the same ups and downs as the earlier period. The most recent peak in the middle of 2018 of 41 children wasn’t far off the all-time maximum of 45 in 2011. Bearing in mind that, counting all the church helpers, the child attenders are typically matched by the same number of adults, 80-90 people results in bedlam, and is really too much for our space and facilities. 70ish is a more comfortable result to aim at.

The latest few years’ results are of limited value: we only had two Messy Churches in 2020 before the first lockdown; two in 2021; and only three so far this year. But our extremely low current figures do seem to be a very clear effect of the pandemic. I think my impression that the decline was more long-term is related to my memory of other aspects of worship - that we’ve been unable to sustain a Sunday School for some years, or that attendance at the Family Service, which drew about a hundred people on a couple of occasions in 2014 and 2015, with 20-25 children, suddenly virtually halved in the course of two years, losing all its children in the process. Why this happened when nothing actually changed with the worship itself remains mysterious; and, in fact, while you can see that our Messy Church’s decline is related to the pandemic, the detail of that is also foggy. Nobody can give us a clear reason.