The 'Messy' Road Ahead

The 'Messy' in the title is there because this is the first blog in hopefully a series through the beginning of this year about Messy Church. Not about how it works, my thoughts on it, whether it's church, etc. No, they will broadly fall under the currently much debated and discussed category of discipleship.

Some background first. This post is slightly long but it is because it is the first and has all the background.

In the parish I minister in one of the churches has been running MC for around 3 years now. It's gone well, we have a average attendance of about 40-50 adults and children who aren't regular church attenders and the local congregation support it well.

Over the end of 2010 though we felt tired and decided to take Jan 2011 off and review everything. Over the course of 2010 we had been having ongoing, informal discussions and chats about discipleship and the future of MC.

So we had a meeting this week about what we should do. I must confess that a lot of what I write from here on will probably be from a personal view point. Though I will do my best to represent to overall feel. To understand my own personal thoughts and views on the future of children's ministry and the Church see my previous post.

I said I believed that if MC carried on as it does now then in 10 years we will look back and see that it was just another blip on the ongoing radar of church decline. Think midweek clubs and similar. Others weren't as sure but still there was a feeling that some type of change was needed.

Christine (the vicar) had expressed, not just in that meeting, that the community aspect of MC was vital and encouraging but that it still felt as though it was us doing it for them. Along those lines was expressed that us doing it was extremely time and labour consuming and hindered people from interacting. Also we felt that the parts of MC (welcome, craft, celebration, meal) often felt seperated. Maybe partly because we moved from room to room for each activity.

On my own part I expressed that I felt that spirituality and the church was a very individualized affair. 'This is what Jesus taught, you go and do it on your own. If you don't no one is going to check up on you.' Also I felt that bringing God's justice and peace into the world was often lost.

So we decided on trying the following two changes as possible ways forward. First we'll do the welcome, craft, and celebration all in the same space and we'll try to mix them all together rather than do them as separate items. Second we'll take a teaching from the term and go and do it 'together' for one of the MC's. So we are exploring the possibility of doing March's MC in the nursing home.

I don't know what will happen but I will post as we go along. So continue to check back if you're interested. I'll leave you will this quote from Philip Kenneson that I often ignore, it's on my office wall, but gave courage in looking towards these changes.

What our world is waiting for, and the church seems reluctant to offer, is not more incessant talk about objective truth, but an embodied witness that clearly demonstrates why any one should care about any of this in the first place.

A New Year's Direction

Since it’s the New Year I feel compelled to look towards the future. I suppose it’s what you always do as a new year starts. Though I will not be making any resolutions in this blog.

One thought or comment constantly comes up when talking to people about children and families. How do we get the children and there families into church? And every time someone asks me I look at them and confess that I don’t have a neat solution. It seems my wife was right, I don’t know everything!

This question and even the future of children’s ministry has been wearing on me for some time. There seems to be this feeling that a new direction is there waiting to be discovered but it always seems to be just out of reach. Like a shadow moving in and out of the dark.

Over the break I did some catch up reading of some articles but also read The Jesus I Never Knew. Which has been beside my bed for a few months. It is a book I would highly recommend.

That book alongside other things I’ve read and my reflections on past experience has drawn me more towards one conclusion. The answer to the future of children’s, family, youth or any other ministry will not be found in a new club, event, or program.

This answer has been tried over and over again throughout the past and while they’re have been short term successes there has never been a long term answer. I am now convinced that it’s not just children’s ministry that must change but the whole of the church.

Two statements in The Jesus I Never Knew struck me profoundly. The first was this question, ‘When did the Church become an unfriendly place for sinners?’ The second was that the early Church was known for their care of the poor, oppressed, widows, orphans, etc. It was only after the legalization of Christianity that the Church began placing this responsibility on the state.

My feeling is that we, including myself, have tamed and domesticated the Lion of Judah. We’ve reduced God’s Kingdom to our individual relationships with Him. In the process we’ve made the Church and God’s kingdom an easy place to be. So long as you’re comfortable with a certain moral standard and you don’t interfere with my personal space. And we’ve reduced Christ to a moralistic teacher that gives us some facts and figures that we should memorize to know Him better.

But when I try and read the Gospels through eyes that aren’t western I don’t find a nice Jesus waiting to greet me. I find a Jesus who offended people, that was very wary of the religious middle class (most of the Church), that did the opposite of what I expected, told people hard truths and then watched them walk away. I fear Jesus would have been wary of me and that I might have walked away.

But what does this all have to do with children? That is after all what I’m employed to think about isn’t it?

When I look to the future I don't see a new program that teaches children more facts about a tame Jesus. I see a Church that has changed dramatically. A place where there is still age appropriate space but not segregated space. Where we learn together about the Jesus we put our faith in. Where we read that Jesus said to love your neighbor and we go out, I mean physically remove ourselves from the building, and find the neighbor we can love.

I don’t want my own children to form the view that the Church is a place of individual passion for God. I pray that for them it is a place of communal passion for God. A passion that manifest itself in communal acts of self sacrifice and service towards the poor, oppressed, ostracized, and lonely people that surround us if only we look for them.

But here is the problem. Changing a children’s program or ministry is not enough or even possible to bring about such change. Not without the willingness of the whole church body to change. So the question I pose for the new year is, ‘Are we willing to change?’ Or maybe, ‘Will we receive the kingdom of God or domesticate it?’