Titchfield underestimates God!

12 May 2010

Like many of you, we love welcoming visitors to our Messy Church and it was a privilege to welcome Penny Murrells and her team from a church in our diocese a little while ago. Penny emailed after their first session. I particularly like her indomitable comments towards the end of her email about the restrictions the building places on them. Three cheers for the hoovering saint too!

'Firstly, thank you so much for allowing us to visit you at Cowplain. It was immensely useful and helped our MC to be the success it was.

'We had no idea how many to expect and helpers were in short supply, so we thought about 30 might be a nice manageable number and that was what we had at 4.00 pm. God had other ideas. By 4.30 pm we had 74 and about 45 of them were children. (The cook was asking us to close the doors as the numbers increased by the minute.) This in a church where there are no children in the Sunday services and only a few at our daughter church. Most of the children and families were, therefore, totally unconnected with the church. Fantastic! Just what we wanted.

'We had about 20 helpers - not enough - but they were all very enthusiastic. One dear lady spent nearly an hour hoovering the whole church and chapter room at the end! Our facilities are very limited. We have one small chapter room - about a quarter of the size of your hall - which has to double at kitchen, so we spread the crafts in corners around the church, just keeping painting and cake decorating in the chapter room closest to hand-washing facilities. Then we had the celebration in the chancel while we frantically moved tables - we don't have a lot of these either - to the back of the church for the meal.

'It all worked in the end, it was brilliant, the families loved it, said it was really good and would be back next time. We have learnt a lot, e.g. that a huge pot of water for pasta will take over an hour to boil - it still wasn't bubbling at five to five and the cook was frantic!. But we got there and everyone ate loads. So if you have a grade 1 listed building, a tiny kitchen, 1 loo, no proper hall and a sizeable chunk of the congregation a bit doubtful, you can still do Messy Church and make it work!

Thanks for all your help.

Regards

Penny'