Messy Church

Messy Church is a way of "being ‘church’ for families, especially for those not part of a church. The first Messy Church in Canada was launched in April 2007 at St. George’s Georgetown ON and quickly followed by others across the country. Messy Churches are found across Canada in a wide range of denominations in urban and rural communities, all focused on building a Christ-centred community that is welcoming and great fun!" Messy Church Canada

Many Salvation Army corps in Canada and Bermuda are using Messy Church as a way to engage their community in a multi-age event to spread the good news and build meaningful relationship with people in the community.

"We have been running a Messy Church program here at Peterborough Temple since Sept. We have it once a month on Saturday (the fourth Sat of the month) and we have been so encouraged to see the community people coming in to join us. We have a committee of 8 and each month is planned with a theme in mind and everything is geared to that theme. An interesting thing about the actual attendance is that there are very few people who normally attend the corps, that come to Messy church. We can't figure out why they would not want to join in the fun and meet people from the community. Our attendance is normally in the 70's but we have been as high as 120. They are families that mostly live in the area of the corps, (downtown) and many are in the low income bracket. This has been such a great way of meeting people and opening our church to them and we have received so many positive comments from the people attending. They are always looking forward to what awaits them next month.
We would encourage people to really look at this ministry as an excellent way of meeting people in your community."
Kathy Sharp (Major), Officer at Peterborough Temple

Find out more about this at www.MessyChurch.ca. Register for the newsletter and resource information at info@messychurch.ca

NOTE: You can collect statistic for Messy Church in SAMIS. Find out how to activate Messy Church for your ministry unit here.