In November 2021, an email dropped into our inbox from Alex Scott at Holy Trinity Leicester asking for some support in starting a Messy Church. Covid had interrupted their schools work, and they had a smaller youth and children’s team. They had been working in Belgrave St. Peter’s Primary School, running an after-school club for many years. It had been popular, but they’d never seen any fruit in the life of the city centre church. The decision was taken to give it one last go, to restart the club and to do a pilot of Messy Church in December.
Due to the timescales, a Zoom call with Jane Butler, Messy Church Training Lead, was hastily arranged and the team were given a crash course in getting started.
They were anxious: it was advertised in the last week of term, the school is in an area of high deprivation, parental engagement in the school was notoriously low and Covid was resurging. Would anyone come?
We received another email the day after their first Messy Church,
‘We had 44 Adults, and 59 children attend, a total of 103 people (plus our team of 14 would make it a church service of 117).
Comments at the end included,
- I think it needed to be longer
- We’ll come again
- I didn’t really know what to expect, but I really liked it
- The food was good
- I really liked the bit at the end (by this they meant the celebration)
- I thought it would just be for the kids I was glad that there was stuff for the adults
- I really liked do stuff as a family
- I liked the bits that got you to think about stuff and to engage with it.
I am confident that 80-90% of people in the room (not including team) were unchurched but they encountered God in song, discussion, bible study, sermon and in others through fellowship; in the messy church format.’
They took this this as a sign from God that they should continue and gathered a team of 12 volunteers from HTL to run a once-a-month Messy Church at the school. Since then, they have seen over half of the schools’ children come, had over 200 different people attend, and had between 25 and 50 people at each session.
“We began to dream big. We were aware that the monthly meetings were appreciated by the school community, but there was a sense of it being an event, not a church, something which was flown in rather than a community. We wanted to plant a fully-fledged church. We began to explore what else we could do; we established a food bank run from the school. But time limits on the volunteers seemed to be setting the limits. But then some funding was found to employ a part time pioneer to develop what we had started.”
In January 2023 Alex’s wife Anne took on the role, and they shifted from event to community. Anne organised litter picks around the area and off the back of that, an enquirers course. One person came! A gatekeeper into the community. The church has made deep connections in the local area including the local pub and Aldi who partner to provide a community cupboard. They have also established another expression of church, an outdoor Messy Church, or ‘Mossy Church’ as they call it, making use of some woodland and a fire pit.
“Most exciting of all, we are seeing a community established. A unique indicator of this has been around 3 couples in our team. In 2022 when Elena and Asher got married, the community attending Messy Church wished them well, but 6 months later when Cam and Harriet got married the community insisted that we should hold a pre-ceremony for them in Messy Church. We had a station to make confetti and write prayers of blessing for them. Charlotte, one of our regulars, made them a cake, which they cut before our ‘wedding breakfast’ meal after a confetti shower. When a month later Jess and James got married, we had to do the same, and members of the Messy Church travelled to Jess’ hometown to be part of the actual wedding.”
“We’ve come a long way in just 18 months. We are about to start our second enquirers course, mid-week groups and have a committed congregation of about 20 that attend every fortnight we meet and bring friends. Many tell us they would never go to church, and we tell them this is Church, to which they reply no this is better, this is Messy Church.”
In March, Jane was lucky enough to visit Belgrave St. Peter’s along with a film crew from the Church Of England. You can see the video here.
Get started
If you’re interested in starting a Messy Church and want to find out more, please contact us at messychurch@brf.org.uk or sign up for one of our free, online Starting your Messy Church Masterclasses.
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