Join Community UMC on the fifth Sundays (January 29, April 30, July 30, October 29, and December 31) for Messy Church!
What is Messy Church? Messy Church is a welcoming space outside of a traditional church for people to build relationships with God, with each other and with their community. At Messy Church, all ages meet together to learn about Christ through games, crafts and activities, music, and storytelling from the Bible. A foundational ingredient of Messy Church is to gather around a table for a snack or meal and build relationships with each other, God, and the world.
Messy Church is an opportunity for all-ages to join in experiencing fun and faith-formative activities, based on five core values:
- Christ-centered: Messy Church is a church that helps people to encounter and enter into a transforming relationship with Jesus. Messy Church believes with the historic churches, in the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
- All-age: Messy Church is for adults and children to enjoy together. Every element should be relevant and accessible to all ages.
- Creativity: Messy Church uses hands-on activities to explore Bible stories, to reflect a God of creativity and to give people a chance to play together.
- Hospitality: Messy Church reflects a God of unconditional love and is a church for people outside of a traditional church, providing an oasis of welcome and a safe place in which to thrive. Messy Church is about hospitality, expressed most evidently by eating together- whether it’s a plate of sandwiches to share, a full course meal or pizza.
- Celebration: Messy Church reflects a God of joy who wants all of God’s people to have life in all its fullness.
Messy Church invites each person to:
- “come-as-you-are” in all your own complexity and be welcoming to others across all potential divisions – physical fitness, age, gender, preferred music, politics, church roles, race, money;
- meet and get to know a child or youth and speak to them by name and recognizing them as special in our community;
- free busy young families to rest in the company of friends without the worry of a crying baby or rambunctious behavior being discouraged or judge
- sit with someone who comes to church as a solitaire;
- share a meal and conversation with gladness because it is prepared for you;
- laugh and enjoy doing something new and perhaps different from your usual comfortable choices;
- be willing to prepare for and clean up after one another;
- practice play and become a bit more child-like in seeking Jesus with others who are also seeking him; and,
- experience the surprise of God’s Spirit at work forming us into a family that knows, trusts and cares for one another not because we are all alike, rather because we are all brothers and sisters in Jesus’ family.
