Spring has finally come to the UK, with blossom gracing our trees and colour peeking out of the ground in the shape of snowdrops and daffodils – and aptly, the Messy Momentum project is budding to life too.
With funding from the Church of England, we are running an innovative project – which we’ve named Messy Momentum – to enable Messy Churches across the UK to better engage with young people and more fully encompass our ‘all-aged’ value. Please read Aike’s wonderful article from December for more on the full project grant.
The first step was listening to our young people, and we conducted a listening exercise over February 2025 to ensure we heard from them, their parents/carers and leaders, to better understand why young people tend not to stay engaged in Messy Church once they hit secondary school age.
With this feedback in hand and an objective to create a range of six pilots to trial in Messy Churches, we gathered an expert group of people for a two-day consultation at High Leigh. Alongside the Messy Church team (all six of us!) were participants from a range of organisations and backgrounds, each one with a wealth of knowledge and experience of working with young people and intergenerational ministry.
We had an incredibly productive few days, covering a packed programme to take us on a journey of thought-provoking and creativity-inducing activities, first learning and stretching our skills and imagination before designing, evaluating and defining our pilot approaches to make them practical and achievable. There was a real sense of passion and openness in the room, with everyone actively participating in the process and creating some great approaches for the Messy Church team to further develop.
We look forward to sharing these pilots with you in the near future, after we have refined and made them fit-for-purpose, ready to set-up and engage young people in your Messy Church.
If you are interested in this project, we would love to talk to you about it! We are looking to recruit 25-30 Messy Churches with a cohort of older children (aged nine or older) to run a pilot with us over the next two years. If you think this could be you and your Messy Church, or if you have queries or questions, please do get in touch with our Youth Project Lead, Sophie Harber, through sophie.harber@brf.org.uk
Whatever the age-range or capacity of your Messy Church, please continue to pray with us for the new project and the team as it develops. We are super excited by the possibilities but aware of the realities, and know we need the spirit to guide every aspect of the project.
The Messy Church team would like to thank everyone who came to the consultation and so generously gave their time, energy, expertise and creativity to this exciting new project. With many thanks to:
Gail Adcock, Methodist Church
Kathy Bland, Hereford Diocese (CofE)
Tom Conway, Church of England Vision and Strategy team
Chris Curtis, Youthscape
Claire Dalpra, Brendan Research
Sam Donoghue, London Diocese (CofE)
Richard Fisher, BRF Ministries
Anna Hawkin, Parenting for Faith (BRF Ministries)
Natasha Lee, Leeds Diocese (CofE)
H.Miller, CCX Multiply
Andy Milne, Missional Youth Church Network
Jules Morgan, BRF Ministries
Tobi Omoloso, Growing Faith Foundation
Sam Richards, URC and Intergenerate UK
Becky Sedgwick, Parenting for Faith (BRF Ministries)
Alice Smith, Youthscape
Richard Tiplady, Brendan Research
We look forward to further working with and sharing the fruit of the process with them.
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