by Lucy Moore
Fifteen sessions for exploring the Christian life with families
Messy Church is a great vehicle for connecting with families who’d never go through the front door of a church.
Clynt French, Church Army, Sheffield
The more I do Messy Church, the more I’m excited.
Karen Markusson, Lutheran Church, Denmark
About
A new resource for Messy Churches, providing a further 15 sessions focused around key ‘Christian basics’ themes such as prayer and reading the Bible. There is also an introduction exploring and addressing situations that have arisen in different Messy Churches.
Each two-hour session includes:
- Bible reference and background
- easy-to-prepare recipes for the meal
- ten simple theme-related craft activities
- ‘take-away’ ideas
- and a family-friendly service outline
Contents
- Introduction
- Session 1 A new start
- Session 2 Love rules
- Session 3 Mothers and others
- Session 4 Easter
- Session 5 The Holy Spirit
- Session 6 The Lord’s Prayer
- Session 7 Our community
- Session 8 Journeys
- Session 9 Harvest
- Session 10 Light up the darkness
- Session 11 Remember me
- Session 12 Christmas
- Session 13 Money matters
- Session 14 Pets and peace
- Session 15 Healthy body, healthy soul
- Appendix
- Index of activities
- Bible index
- Further resources
From the Introduction
In this book you’ll find 15 sessions for Messy Church that are, in the great Messy tradition, suggestions for you to adapt and improve for your own circumstances, rather than an inflexible programme to be adhered to.
It may look more constructive to have a series that extends over several months, but in practice, most people find it hard to hold the narrative thread across a month’s gap, so a series isn’t necessarily very helpful and can be restrictive. Instead, we’ve taken the Christian year as a whole, offering one-off sessions, which nevertheless have themes that link them, as you’ll see.
The sessions have a focus on the Christian year: Christmas, Easter, Pentecost and Harvest with a nod to Rogationtide and All Saints’ Day. These major festivals help us to establish key points of the Christian faith: God’s creation and on-going care for the world (a theme also recognised in Session 14: ‘Pets and Peace’); Christ’s birth, death and resurrection; and the coming of the Holy Spirit. They also give us a chance to reflect on prayer (Session 6: ‘The Lord’s Prayer’) and on the Bible (Session 10: ‘Light up the darkness’, or the ‘non-Hallowe’en-but-still-lots-of-fun-dressing-up-and-doing-wacky-things’ session).
Technical details
ISBN 9780857461209
Price £8.99
Published 23 November 2012
Pages 192
