Messy wedding!

Is this the first truly Messy Church wedding? Robin Jones, Regional Coordinator, and Jenny Dickin, both leaders of the original Messy Church in Cowplain, were married on Saturday in a very Messy wedding!
There were plenty of activities on the Bible passage to enjoy before and after the ceremony (with aprons provided for the messier ones, to keep those party frocks clean) and food and drink to welcome guests as we arrived, as well as to enjoy afterwards. There was also a sense of happy, frantic, all-hands-on-deck preparation going on in the kitchen beforehand, which felt just like a normal Messy Church – certainly not what the groom’s mother is usually doing in the run-up to her son’s wedding!
Perhaps more significantly, in their decisions about how they wanted the day to be, the bride and groom had embraced not only each other, but the Messy Church values of hospitality, creativity, celebration, being truly all-age and Christ very definitely at the centre. They expressed the same reckless courage that Messy Churches often do, refusing to be bound by tradition and creating instead their own tradition, language and expectations. Robin bowed to convention enough to put on a long-sleeved shirt instead of his perennial t-shirt, but that was the only real concession to expectations. Both Jenny and Robin could be seen, just before they walked up the aisle together, busily setting tables in the hall at the back of the church.
There was a sense of celebrating this wonderful commitment as part of a big church family and of everyone joining in the ceremony, not just being spectators. We all wrote our prayers on luggage tags during the service and tied them to the strings of the balloons decorating the church. It was joyful, respectful, authentic and, as everyone said at least once during the day, ‘so very Jenny and Robin’.
Jenny and Robin, our prayers are with you as you take your hospitable, outward-looking love into the rest of your lives together.