Welcome To St Mary’s Parish Church Website

Messy Church aims to provide families with opportunities to meet Christians and the concepts of Christianity in a non-threatening and informal way. This enables an understanding that Christians are OK and so is Christianity. It is another way of doing Church for people who have opted out of church and find that more traditional worship does not appeal, or is relevant, to them. This enables us as a church family to reach out to our community and neighbours.

In his book “The Invisible Church” Steve Aisthope states that we have to move the church to the people and ensure it’s relevance to modern life. He talks about organic fellowship growing naturally where people are. Like the ecologists he calls this “rewilding”. He goes on to say that Christianity and it’s abiding truths are constant, however the way we do church needs to evolve to ensure we are relevant to all and this is what I think Messy Church does.

Messy Church is designed for people who don’t belong to another form of church and meets at a time and place that suits them. It is for people at all stages of their life and journey and should be seen as a valuable congregation itself. Above all it is for all ages and fun!! Messy Church is moving to fun for all but its focus is still on children.

The messy church literature states that Church as moved from the centre to edges of society and we as a church family need to learn to live at the edges again and rebuild the community within it’s “fuzzy” and messy groupings where belonging, behaving and believing are a process rather than neat and integrated. Think of the feeding of the 5000 in Luke – Jesus is not having a meeting of loyal disciples; it’s a messy gathering of local crowds who have followed him to hear what he has to say. Jesus ensures they are fed both spiritually and physically.

We work in a friendly and creative way – the messier the creativity the better!! We learn and play together through crafts, music, games, storytelling and, above all, food.

Here at St Mary’s we meet on the last Sunday of the month at 2pm and focus on families with school age children – but all children of all ages are welcome. We have made string and paint hearts, did coin and bark rubbing, planted seedlings, painted feet, made banners and posters, built volcanoes… Above all we have fellowship together with fun and food.

For any further information Please contact: Sheila Ogden on Mob. 07967566081, email sheila@sheilapayne.info or Elspeth Cherry on St Mary’s King Street Facebook page.