Messy Church is a fantastic way to bring God’s love into communities through engagement with children, young people and their households. Thanks to generous funding from the Church of England, we can offer a support package to CofE Churches in areas of deprivation wanting to start a new Messy Church. We can offer microgrants of £250 to purchase resources for your new Messy Church, a bundle of Messy Church books worth over £50, training and ongoing support in the form of an online learning community of Messy Church leaders ministering in areas of deprivation.
If you are unsure whether your church is in an area of deprivation, there is a really helpful lookup tool on the Church Urban Fund webpage (https://cuf.org.uk/lookup-tool). To qualify for a Messy Microgrant your church needs to be in the 25% most deprived parishes in the country. When you input your church data, if your parish ranks 3054 or below (where 1 is the most deprived) then we would love to hear from you.
Are you part of the Church of England? Is your church situated in an area of deprivation? Would you like support to help launch a Messy Church to reach out into your local community? If the answer is “Yes!” to all the questions above then we can help.
What do we ask from you?
We’re so excited to be able to help you launch your new Messy Church. Before you apply for a grant, chat to your church leadership team and make sure that you have their support; Messy Church is a worshipping community for all ages and it is vital to have the support of a wider church congregation in making that a reality. In order to qualify for the grant, you would need to aim to run Messy Church once a month in your parish. Once you have the go-ahead from your church leadership, please feel free to apply.
Once your application has been accepted we will ask you to attend one of our Starting Your Messy Church Masterclasses. This 90-minute interactive training session on Zoom will give you a great starting point for finding out about what Messy Church is (and isn’t!), the Messy Church values, resources you need to start and how to make it a disciple-making community from the very beginning.
Once you have completed the Masterclass, we will make the grant payment to you and you will be ready to launch your Messy Church. We will also invite you to become part of our Messy Churches in Areas of Deprivation Learning Cohort. We will have termly check-ins where we can hear stories of how God is at work, and learn from each other. This forms part of our Messy Church Support Package. After 6 months, we would love for you to share a story from your Messy Church with the wider Messy Church family through a blog post or news article on our website/social media. We can’t wait to see what God will do through your new Messy Church!
What can you spend the money on?
It is completely up to you what you spend the grant on; anything is possible as long as it helps to facilitate to running your Messy Church. We realise that starting new things can feel a little daunting so we have created some Kit Lists that are full of recommended resources and equipment to help make your Messy Church run as smoothly as possible.
Applications are now open!
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