Rev Dan Crouch, Vicar at Holy Trinity Yeovil reflects on their Holy Week Messy Church event and how their work amongst children and families is beginning to grow.
On the Wednesday of Holy Week at Holy Trinity Church and Community Centre we were delighted to welcome 85 children and around 50 adults to explore the story of Holy Week at Messy Church through a range of creative activities, storytelling and food. What a wonderful opportunity it was to enable them to hear the gospel in a way that was relevant for them. Of those 85 children, an impressive 37 had not been to a Messy Church event previously and over the course of 6 Messy Church events we have been in contact with more than 140 children. Our Holy Week Messy Church was among the easier events to plan as the journey through the events of this time lend themselves readily to creative activities and storytelling.
In our context we are located adjacent to a primary school, and we effectively share a site with a housing estate nearby. This makes ministry to children and families an obvious priority. In effect we stumbled upon our current approach out of a combined sense of urgency to re-establish a regular opportunity to gather children and families at church and a desire to offer activities during school holidays without sufficient resources to hold a Holy Week Bible Club. Our Toddler group meets on a Wednesday in term time and so we settled on a Wednesday and in August 2022 we held events at the beginning and end of the school holidays. It really seems to be meeting a need in our local community.
I’d love to be able to share the ‘secret of our success’ but to be honest we’ve somewhat stumbled upon a model that is successful in our context and the biggest encouragement we can offer others is to think about what might work in your situation and give it a go.