I had the privilege of visiting the archaeological site of Pompeii this September and found myself marvelling at the sophistication of Roman society. In 79AD they had fast food take-away restaurants (thermopoliums), shops, food markets, bakeries and bars. The aqueduct supplied running water to their homes, public fountains and thermal baths, equipped with gyms, locker rooms, sauna and steam rooms. Construction was enabled through concrete, but aesthetics in architectural design was key. The rich lived in palatial villas with frescoes, mosaics and underfloor heating. One entrance even had a mosaic on the floor warning, ‘Beware of the dog’. For entertainment they had a large and small theatre, an amphitheatre for the gladiators, brothels and temples, depending on what you worshipped. They even had one-way streets for carts and pedestrian zones. An impressive culture, admittedly built upon funding from oppressed Roman colonies, dispensable slaves and dubious morals.
With an amazing view of the turquoise waters in the Bay of Naples, it appears that the people of Pompeii had it all. What they hadn’t realised was that the enormous lone mountain that lay behind, with rich fertile soils, was in fact a volcano. Despite the warning signs: a huge earthquake 17 years beforehand, new tremors for the preceding two weeks, and sulphurous smells emerging through the water supply, on 24th August 79AD catastrophic disaster struck. Mount Vesuvius erupted, ejecting a cloud of super-heated gases, molten rock, pulverized pumice and hot ash, obliterating several Roman towns including Pompeii and Herculaneum. The total death toll from the eruption remains unknown.
I couldn’t help but question, despite their sophisticated society and lavish lifestyles, how they failed to realise they had built their city on a ticking time bomb? Why did they not listen to the warning signs? If someone had told them what was about to happen, would they have believed it and taken appropriate action?
A simple answer is that there was no living memory or written record of Vesuvius being a volcano. They lacked a guide, geological expertise, a risk assessment and emergency disaster plan!
What’s all this got to do with Messy Church?
I started to reflect on the mini disaster that befell my own Messy Church Goes Wild this Summer. The community garden where we meet, is part of a school. However, for the past 2 years, no one has taken overall responsibility for the site. The community gardening group never really got going and fell apart; the pioneer vicar, one of our key links to the school, left a year ago; and over time, it has gradually become overgrown with brambles and self-sown buddleia bushes – great for butterflies, but increasingly hard to keep inquisitive children safe from all the natural hazards.
Our Messy Church Goes Wild community has done our best to maintain what we could with our monthly gatherings, but nature was well and truly taking over. We planned some emergency gardening to make the site safe again, but when I turned up in the summer holidays, I discovered that the school’s maintenance team had already been in and destroyed a section of the garden, pulling apart some of the raised beds and dumping the wooden sleepers in a dangerous pile. The buddleia and brambles were left in piles in the areas that we had managed to keep clear, making the site completely unusable. With the head teacher away on annual leave, we were unable to find out the plan (I’m still not convinced there is one), other than being told that the school wanted to make the garden, ‘more accessible’. Two months later, there’s been no further progress in the garden. Disaster – no place for our MCGW to meet!
The warning signs were all there: decreasing relationship with the school, poor communication, lack of an overall maintenance plan and community garden champion. We limped on and did what we could. In hindsight, we could’ve tackled some of the wider issues earlier.
However, unlike the total disaster that hit Pompeii, all is not lost for our Messy Church. The headteacher has allowed us to use the primary school hall this term, which we’d been angling to use during the winter months for the past three years (thank you God!).
We had our first gathering of the term last week and I’m pleased to report that a record number of people turned up (60), including new families (thank you God!). We harvested our one surviving giant pumpkin from the garden, which provided a fantastic ‘guess the weight of the pumpkin’ competition, entered by many of the dad’s but won by the latest recruit to the team, a returning year 7 student who offered her services (thanks again God!).
We put her in charge of scooping out the pumpkin seeds for counting and roasting (activity 7 in October’s Get Messy! vol. 3 Street Child session on compassion), as we considered that by planting just one seed, not only can it grow into a pumpkin, but inside that pumpkin is the potential for hundreds more pumpkins to grow. We used this analogy to wonder about what seeds of kindness we could plant over the next month and how that might make a difference and be multiplied.
I wonder…?
What warning signs are we ignoring at Messy Church?
Do we have our risk assessments, first aiders and mitigation plan in place?
Have you experienced a situation where God has turned around what on the surface feels like a disaster? If so, we’d love to hear your story, please get in touch: messychurch@brf.org.uk
Aike Kennett-Brown
BRF ministries Messy Church Ministry Lead
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