What is Messy Church?
Messy Church is an interactive worship experience for the whole family where kids AND parents or grandparents come together on the second or third Sunday of each month to experience:
Music & Games
Fun Teaching about God
Dinner
Find hope, have fun, and connect with new friends, God, and your family!
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 one God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
- All-ages: 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 judged
- 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.
Upcoming Messy Church Dates
Messy Church meets on Sunday afternoons from 4-6pm (including dinner). Join us at Trinity United Methodist Church at 2311 Elizabeth Ave. Park in the paved lot behind the church, off of Elizabeth Avenue. You’ll see friendly faces greeting you at the double doors leading into the church. Mark your calendar: we plan to have Messy Church for the 2024-2025 school year on:
- September 15
- October 20
- November 17
- December 15
- January 19
- February 16
- March 16
- April 13
- May 18
What to stay up to date? Sign up here for e-mail updates; just be sure to select “Messy Church.”
Messy Church at Trinity is part of a worldwide movement of being the Church in a new way. Learn more at messychurchusa.org.