Three hundred
09 March 2010
Martin, the unsung hero in the BRF office who deals with all the parts of the websites that are shrouded in mystery for me (basically, all of 'em), informed me this month that we now have 302 Messy Churches registered on the Directory. 302! That's a lot of families enjoying themselves in church. Imagine if most Messy Churches have between 20 and 140 people in them - that's an average of 60 people in each, which makes it round about 18,000 people coming to church once a month, encountering ...
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London Fiesta
06 March 2010
Huge congratulations to the organiser of today's Messy Fiesta, the London Dioceses Children's Adviser Sam Donoghue and his wife: he wasn't actually there, as he'd got slightly muddled as to his priorities and had chosen to spend the day with his wife who had gone into labour, rather than coming to the Fiesta. Sam's wife gave birth to a son halfway through the day: all very exciting, and, let's hope, not too messy. Oh dear, so tempting to start thinking of how messy birth is, and how many ...
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Changing the Landscape
05 March 2010
In my previous blog I mentioned Lindsey who's working with me for five weeks as part of her course at Moorlands Bible College. I don't know what the rest of her colleagues are doing, but I suspect Lindsey's Friday in Lincoln might have been slightly different from the experiences of many of them.
We headed ever more northwards, going from a BRF trustees' meeting at the office in Abingdon up to my parents' in Boston for the night, then onwards and upwards to Lincoln, where Fresh ...
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Glasgow
04 March 2010
My word, it was cold! Not the welcome, or the even more welcome soup at lunchtime or the enthusiasm of the group gathered to share stories or find out about Messy Church in Glasgow, but the temperature of the church we met at felt sub-zero, even if it can't have been. Surely. But Lindsey, the placement student from Moorlands who's with me at the moment, said she watched a pair of lips turn gradually blue in the course of their conversation... There was a gradual furtive movement towards the ...
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Too many people!
03 March 2010
I've had a couple of emails recently from leaders with a BIG problem: they fear too many people coming to Messy Church! So put that in your 'church is dead' pipe and smoke it, oh people who say church attendance is dropping irredeemably.
But it is a problem, as nobody wants to turn folk away, but at the same time, you need to keep things safe and manageable and have some level of intimacy. I'll copy one of the emails below with my answer, but if you have any further inspiration, do ...
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