Response to ‘Real Me’ session

With social media both as a marvellous boon and a threat to wellbeing, it’s more important than ever to help people understand themselves as loved and valued just as they are. Have you seen the free Real Me Messy Church session? Jane will be speaking on this subject at the Liedentity Conference on 20 February. Feedback for the session has been good, such as this email:
‘I’ve been meaning to mail you all week – but only just got round to it – to tell you what an excellent Messy Church we had last Saturday when we did your ‘Real Me’ session. In the end, we missed out the stone painting as we have done that quite recently, and the egg box game as we had also done something quite similar to that in October. All the other crafts/activities worked brilliantly and people were having excellent discussions at the craft tables. With a bit of encouragement from us, even our six wonderful teenage boys had a go at talking about the questions this month because they too seemed to sense what an important topic it was. People were so engaged with what was going on that even those who are normally prone to flit from one thing to another tended to spend much longer on fewer activities. This was particularly true for the “God can” and “I can” cans. One seven-year-old stopped on the way out and sifted through both cans to find her two favourite ones to show me. They were, “God can bring peace” and “I can forgive people who hurt me”.
‘The junk model person was particularly popular with the teenagers and he ended up being about seven feet tall! It was lovely to see lots of dads in particular sitting down with their children and making the DNA molecule from pipe cleaners. The celebration was probably one of our best ever, with the story of Samuel anointing David ably acted out by Paul and four boys – three very tall ones and one rather small one! We followed this by singing “I am special because God has loved me” and during the meal, one of the dads, who is actually a long-time Sunday attender as well as someone who comes to Messy Church, told Paul with a tear in his eye that, thanks to the story being acted out and the words of the song, he understood for the first time how much God really loved him.’

You can download the Real Me session here.