4 O’Clock Church

Emma Coy is Children and Families Minister at Holy Trinity Claygate. She has been on the leadership team of 4 O’Clock Church since its inception and is enthusiastic about finding creative ways for God’s people to learn and worship together. She writes about the extra weekly service that has come from their Messy Church ministry.
We have been running a very popular after school Messy Church at Holy Trinity Claygate for a number of years. We have had the privilege of seeing many hundreds of children and adults come through the doors and enjoy and benefit from all that the Messy Church offers.
In addition to this, for the past two years, we have been running a weekly All Age Worship service which we call 4 O’Clock Church on a Sunday afternoon. We meet together for worship, interactive learning from the Bible, creative prayer and food. We regularly celebrate communion together and have baptised 4 children. It has been a huge blessing and a real complement to what we were already doing and continue to do at Messy Church.
Meeting on a Sunday enables whole families to come together around God’s word. Meeting weekly has enabled us to grow a real sense of community, with people keen to help out and serve in a number of ways. We have seen new families coming into church and subsequently both children and adults growing in faith and becoming part of our wider church community in a very real way.
We aim to place the Bible at the centre of all we do and have used a simple and sustainable model to deliver Bible teaching on Exodus, 1&2 Kings, Luke, John and 1 Peter. We have learnt that it is possible to tackle just about any biblical genre in the context of creative All Age Worship and are having a lot of fun along the way!