Messy Momentum – pilots prepare for lift-off!

We launched our new project, Messy Momentum, back at the beginning of the summer, to share our plans of innovative ways to engage young people in Messy Church and better encompass our ‘all age’ value – and thus inspire Messy Churches all over the UK to join us in trialing these pilot approaches too.

The summer has been busy, recruiting and conversing with a number of Messy Churches who were inspired and happy to help us – and we are so happy to have 18 of them on-board, with a few still in the process! These generous, diligent Messy Churches have signed-up from a range of denominations, locations and settings – beautifully representing the wonderful diversity of the Messy Church network! – and are getting ready to ‘lift-off’ in January 2026!

We began training with some September ‘set-up sessions’ for all pilot Messy Churches, embedding the Messy Church values into all we do from the get-go and outlining key project information to build a solid pilot launchpad. September also saw the start of our in-house ‘Youthscape Essentials’ course, enabling two people from each pilot Messy Church to attend this excellent training to upskill and empower better working with older children and teens.

Each of the pilot approaches also has it’s own cohort and training is well underway with these and will be continuing over the Autumn term; in these sessions we will be exploring the new approaches and how to implement them comprehensively, equipping with resources and coaching, familiarising ourselves with the data capture tools we have designed to observe and evaluate what is working (and what isn’t) and – most importantly – building community so that we learn, pray and celebrate together as team Messy Momentum over the next two years.  

If you have been inspired by reading this – there are still a few places available on the pilot and we would welcome some late sign-ups! We are especially looking for Messy Churches to trial the ‘Co-journeying’ approach [read more on the project webpage here] but all approaches have space for one or two more.

Thinking about it? To have a chat about the possibility of joining late – please contact Sophie Harber, Youth Project Lead [sophie.harber@brf.org.uk], who would love to talk to you.

Sophie Harber