The Same but Different!

Martyn reflects on seeing the Get Messy! Magazine in action!
Over this last month I have visited quite a number of Messy Churches who have been using the harvest ideas from Get Messy! about the man who built bigger and bigger barns. It’s been exciting and humbling to see how the same material in the magazine has been used creatively and differently by each Messy Church.
The same message has come over but in a variety of ways, which is of course Messy Church working at its best, adapting itself to each local church and community. The material in the magazine has inspired rather than constrained the teams that have used it. Some built tractors out of LegoTM while others created them from cardboard boxes; some painted barns onto rolls of lining paper while others made a collage of harvest fields; some painted ‘award-winning’ modern art with tractor wheels, while others preferred to focus on balancing biscuits on top of each other to create skyscraper barns stuck together with butter icing!
Whichever activities any individual Messy Church chose to focus on, they all gave plenty of opportunities for friendship-building conversation at the tables as well as a way into exploring this tough but important parable from Jesus for Harvest in the celebration and over the meal.
Next month’s theme is ‘your body is a temple’. Why not check out Lucy’s reflective story based on 1 Corinthians 12 as added inspiration for this session?