Jesus is at the heart of everything we do and the way we do it

This involves encountering Christ as we plan and prepare. It means that at Messy Church the team expects to meet Christ in the child or adult who comes through the door for the first time or who has been part of the church for years. It includes hearing about Jesus and talking about him as we take part in the different elements of Messy Church. It means doing everything in the name of Christ and being a place where everyone can taste and see the kingdom of heaven that Jesus came to bring about.

Being Christ-centred means Messy Church is a church congregation alongside the other congregations of your church, not a feeder into them. It means the team comes to it expecting to meet Christ themselves, not performing ‘at’ or ‘for’ others. It becomes an opportunity for everyone to encounter the mystery of faith rather than morality teaching. Being Christ-centred is about embracing risk rather than simply delivering an event. It will almost certainly be messy, as people and relationships take priority over structures and systems: it certainly was in Jesus’ own ministry!

Messy Church tries to be a gathering of people whose identity is, or might one day grow into being, in Christ.

One traditional model of gathered church is that of sending the children and young people out to their own groups during the main service, so the adults can learn and worship in a particular way and the young people in another.

Messy Church is the opposite of this.

It has at its heart the creation of a space where people of all ages come together safely to learn and worship. It is based on the concept that the church is the body of Christ and that we need each other, in all our differences, to grow as followers of Jesus. Children can learn from adults and adults can learn from children. We all learn how to love each other and to love God by spending time together, worshipping God together, being a model of discipleship for others and letting others be models for us.

The shape of Messy Church is created around the needs of families with children, though, of course, these needs may also be present in the lives of individuals who are at a different stage of family life, such as single people of any age or people living far away from their families. ‘God sets the lonely in families’ and always has, and Messy Church is an opportunity to enjoy the life, liveliness, loving care and purpose of the family of God at all stages of life.

Creativity means Messy Churches are always open to new ideas, imaginative and flexible to change anything inessential to meet the needs of a particular context, season or person. God’s creative power is a transformative power that creates and recreates. This same power is present in every human being, young and old, created as we are in God’s image. Messy Church is a space where that creative spark can grow. For some people, especially those who have never had the chance to be creative, this can be part of a healing process.

Messy Church is a place to play together, to recreate and be recreated as people who are less concerned with material gain or impressing others, and more with simply playing together for love, for fun, enjoying the fruit of the Spirit, which is joy itself.

It involves learning with different parts of our brain, body and senses than we may be used to and it brings our whole personhood into worship.

It is usually messy and may appear wasteful, as creativity often involves trying something new and failing, but trying again in a different way. It might involve making something, destroying something, marvelling at something, learning a new skill or simply playing a game or having a competition. Awe and wonder is all part and parcel of creativity, whether it’s about learning how to use a pair of scissors for the first time or realising something new about God’s love through the activity.

A Messy Church will expect to see new people coming almost every month and will have a friendly welcoming team at the door to make sure newcomers feel at home as quickly as possible.

Every team member will make their activity table an oasis of hospitality, putting the needs of others first, expecting to receive as well as to give in the way they run their activity. The celebration will be planned around the needs of every age group and ability so that the language and level is accessible to everyone. The meal will take into account the needs of people with particular dietary requirements, cultural or health-wise.

Hospitality runs through every Messy Church like a golden thread.

As fellow-guests in God’s church with the families who enjoy Messy Church, the team are both hosts and guests at the same time, just as Jesus was in so many situations.

It is a church of justice and equality, expressed most of all around the meal tables.

Jesus is such a dynamic, engaging figure that his church should be a community of dynamic engagement too. Messy Church tries to show how attractive Jesus is, how engaging, how life-changing and awesome he is, through the very way its participants worship God and experience kingdom together as a community. The way this comes across is often as ‘celebration’ – parties pop up all through the gospels and Messy Church has been compared to a monthly party – sometimes even preferred to birthday parties happening at the same time!

The Christian Year – Advent, Christmas, Easter, Pentecost – provides a framework of festivals to celebrate, which tell and retell the story of God through ritual, festival and party, with special rites, words, actions or foods. These are built into the Messy Church pattern around the year.

Messy Church celebrates who God is and what he’s done but is also a place to celebrate each individual and family. It means noticing each person’s place in God’s bigger picture of the love and significance of every human life. It says to each person, ‘You matter, you are loved, just as you are.’ In its very welcome of any and everybody, Messy Church is a place of celebration of community and people’s significance within that community.

Celebration involves marking significant events within the family of the church and demonstrating that God is concerned with these too. They might be joyful events like birthdays or weddings, but they might also be sadder ones like deaths and illnesses. Messy Church makes a space for everyone to mark what is important to them before God.

Celebration may appear as simply food and fun on the surface, but these symbols stand for the deeper rhythms of faith that well up from unconditional love, restoration, reconciliation, sacrifice, belonging and homecoming among many others. It’s no mistake that some Christians ‘celebrate’ the Eucharist. That spirit of meaningful celebration is present in Messy Church too.