Christmas 1 – Messy Church

This Christmas at church we decided to try something new with our children.  We have good work with the children who come to the church and even with the groups we have associated with, e.g. holiday clubs, junior youth group but we don’t have much of a connection between the two.  One of the reasons for this is that many of the fringe groups we have happen with another church, we run our holiday club with them.  This way we can talk about all the services going on but we can’t really overtly push what happens at the church where I would as these things are shared.

So how could we change this?  And what could we do with a virtually full calendar?

We also wanted to do something that got all ages involved. I would love to do a once a month all age service but with all the different things going on in our services it again becomes difficult, we have found other ways of making parts of our services have all age content and also doing a breakfast club once a month. But it would still be great to do an all age thing, something people would be comfortable inviting others to, something where people can meet others, feel relaxed and not worry too much if their children can’t sit still.

So what combines all those things and would be great for a Christmas event?

Messy Church!

So we started on the long journey of preparing for Messy Church. As with all programs in church work you make it fit yourself and that is what we did for messy church.  We combined it with our junior youth group, Transformers.  We made it part of a big Christmas end of term celebration.  We added carols, a sketch, a talk and of course audience participation – something we normally have at the end of our Transformers evening session.

We combined this with games and crafts as people arrived.  Trying to add a mixture of general Christmas games – get the pretend snowball into the bucket, guess the Christmas film - with games with a nativity link – pin the tail on the donkey, anagrams of Christmas story words and a variety of other games. There were also crafts, things that could be used in the worship – create a prayer bauble, paint a nativity picture and things the children could take home – Christmas cards, decorate candles.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There was an opportunity before worship to dress the Christmas tree from a box of decorations. The children could put them where they liked and again all ages were together. This was followed by our time of worship and then a meal together.

The fantastic part of this messy church event was there was a mixture of our usual families, excited children, toddlers and older people, families who had never come to our church for anything before except to drop their children off at Transformers and others.

There is one thing to remember when doing your own Messy Church. It is messy! And it is meant to be messy.

We can look at our churches and worry what some may say if it gets covered in glue and glitter but even if it takes two and a half hours to clear up (which it did) we can remember that this is an exciting time for the children and their families, a time to have lots of fun, get messy, fell part of what is around you and do it all together.

Messy Church went really well. There was some great feedback from children and adults and even siblings who couldn’t be there getting jealous because their little sister couldn’t stop talking about how good it was and all the things they did. I would recommend it to any church who wanted to try something new. We will definitely be doing another one in Spring term 2011.