Tag: messy church

My previous post on Messy Church generated a fair bit of interest and comment (on Facebook – unfortunately comments here remain closed). I thought it would be good to try and close out the matter with some clarifying comments.
So, here goes:

1. A lot of good stuff happens at Messy Church.

I didn’t make this clear in my previous post, but I appreciate that a lot of work goes into Messy Church all over the country and God is using it. Someone on Facebook, for example, commented about interest in the Alpha course as a result of MC. If people are coming to MC and then going on courses like Christianity Explored or Alpha, that’s great.
My point in the post was not to try and tear down all the good work people are doing! However, I do think we need to ask serious and hard questions of everything that we do – not to tear down, but to see whether we can do it better. We must always be prepared to ask the hard questions of ourselves – and I include myself as the chief of sinners in that regard!
So, given all that, I still think there is a fundamental confusion with Messy Church.

2. What is Church?

Church, according to the New Testament, is comprised of Christians. No exceptions. I’d love to do a full study on this but we don’t have time for it here! – maybe one or two verses will do. In 1 Corinthians 1:2, Paul writes: “To the church of God in Corinth, to those sanctified in Christ Jesus and called to be his holy people, together with all those everywhere who call on the name of our Lord Jesus Christ – their Lord and ours”. So the ‘church of God’ is equated with those who are sanctified and called to be God’s holy people, all those who call on the name of the Lord Jesus. Christians, in a nutshell.
And Ephesians 5:23 talks about the Christ being “the head of the church, his body, of which he is the Saviour.” Christ is, of course, not the Saviour of those who do not believe in him. So I think it’s pretty clear just from these two references that in the New Testament, the church is always comprised of believers.
This is not to say that the church will never have non-believers in it – Paul suggests that such a thing will happen in 1 Corinthians 14:24-25 (“if an unbeliever or an enquirer comes in…”). And, of course, the church in its visible manifestation on earth will always be a mixed bag – comprised of believers and non-believers: we don’t know who they are, but not everyone who is a member of the visible church is a member of the invisible church (to put it as they did at the reformation).
Being a good Anglican, I always like to look at how the 39 articles puts it! –

XIX. OF THE CHURCH

THE visible Church of Christ is a congregation of faithful men, in the which the pure Word of God is preached, and the Sacraments be duly ministered according to Christ’s ordinance in all those things that of necessity are requisite to the same.

So what makes a church, according to the 39 Articles, is (1) a gathering of ‘faithful men’ – i.e. Christians; (2) the preaching of the Word of God; (3) the sacraments (communion and baptism).

Given all this, I don’t think I could define Messy Church as church in either the general Biblical or specific Anglican sense. So…

3. How would you categorise Messy Church?

In my previous post I’d say that Messy Church was a good evangelistic opportunity, but not church. I still think that: I’d be much happier if Messy Church was not seen as church in itself, but as an opportunity to bring people to the good news about Jesus. I don’t think there is such a thing as ‘church for nonbelievers’ – there is only church, comprised of believers, and anything else is designed to bring people to the church.
And this, I think, leads us to one of the fundamental questions which I think caused disagreement:

4. What is the good news?

In the discussion I think some people had a different understanding of the good news to me. In the gospels, Jesus summarises the good news as repentance and faith: turning away from sin and turning to God in faith. You can see this in Jesus’ first recorded words in Mark’s gospel, Mark 1:15 “The kingdom of God has come near. Repent and believe the good news!” (Compare with what Jesus says will be proclaimed to all nations in Luke 24:47).
Why is the gospel such good news? One of the most well-known verses in the Bible is John 3:16. However, the verses which follow it are a little less well known:

For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him. Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe stands condemned already because they have not believed in the name of God’s one and only Son.
… (36) Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life, but whoever rejects the Son will not see life, for God’s wrath remains on them.

The gospel is good news because it is a rescue. It is a rescue from sin, a rescue from the just judgement of a holy God, a rescue from hell (a subject, by the way, being something which Jesus talks quite a lot about e.g. Luke 12:5, “fear him who, after your body has been killed, has authority to throw you into hell. Yes, I tell you, fear him”). 1 Thessalonians 1:10 talks about Jesus as the one “who rescues us from the coming wrath”.

The book of Revelation talks about the future return of Christ – a day which will not be a pleasant one for those who do not know him:

Then the kings of the earth, the princes, the generals, the rich, the mighty, and everyone else, both slave and free, hid in caves and among the rocks of the mountains. They called to the mountains and the rocks, ‘Fall on us and hide us from the face of him who sits on the throne and from the wrath of the Lamb! For the great day of their wrath has come, and who can withstand it?’

And in Revelation 19, we see the well-known description of Jesus as the “King of Kings and Lord of Lords” – coming just after the less well-known verse 15: “He treads the winepress of the fury of the wrath of God Almighty.”

Why am I spending all this time labouring this point? Because I think we need to be crystal clear on what the gospel actually is. If we are confused about the gospel, we will be confused about many other things. If we’re confused about the gospel, we might end up thinking that the gospel is simply ‘being nice’. It is right and proper (and a command of the Lord) to love our neighbour – but that is not the gospel.

The gospel is about salvation. Jude 23 says, “save others by snatching them from the fire” – and I think that’s quite a good description of what the church is about. The fire of divine judgement draws near, the church must be prophetic in warning others but boldy proclaiming the good news that God has given us a means of rescue. The Lord “is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance” (2 Peter 3:9).

5. A final challenge

So, my final word when thinking about Messy Church is this: a challenge. At what point in Messy Church do people hear the gospel as I’ve just defined it? At what point are people confronted with the challenge to repent of their sins and put their faith in Jesus Christ as Lord and Saviour?
I think it’s something which is worth asking for everything a church does – how does this particular activity help people towards the gospel? If, for example, you want that to happen over conversations – you could consider doing an evangelism training course for your team. But our goal must always be to hold out the hope of salvation, and we must ask hard questions and think through everything we do with that in mind.

I’ve been thinking a little bit about church planting recently – more on that some other time. Anyway, in my conversations about it, the idea of Messy Church has come up more than once. If you’ve not been to Messy Church and don’t know what it’s about, there’s plenty of information on the official website. A couple of people have suggested to me that Messy Church might be a good way to start a new church in a fresh location (and one of them was a Bishop, so he ought to know what he’s talking about). Apart from all that, I’ve just finished reading a book on church growth (by Bob Jackson) which says that the numbers of people at Messy Church over the last few years has grown massively – if I recall correctly, nearly half a million people per year now attend Messy Church.

In short, the Church of England (as well as other denominations) are really waving the banner for Messy Church at the moment – some see it to be the future of the church. It is, as people have described it to me, “church for people who don’t do church.”

Back in January, I had an interesting conversation with one of my fellow curates about some of the challenges of Messy Church: there are some serious issues which I think really need to be thought through if the church is going to continue to promote Messy Church as the solution to the problem of getting families involved. As we will see, I hope, Messy Church may solve one or two problems but creates a number of others which I’m not sure can be adequately answered.

I think one of the fundamental questions is this: is Messy Church supposed to be church ‘in itself’? The answer to that question is, apparently, yes. The official website says Messy Church is not:

… a way of getting people to come to church on Sunday – There are examples of people starting in Messy Church and deciding to join Sunday church as well but these are the exception rather than the rule. If people wanted to go to established church, they would be going by now. [My emphasis] Messy Church is interdependent with established church, but will usually operate as a separate congregation or church.

Messy Church is, as I said before, church for people who don’t do church. The idea is that it’s reaching a set of people who wouldn’t come on a Sunday morning. It’s church for them – not half church, or church with the hope of them coming to join ‘proper’ church, but proper church in itself.

I just find this whole thing somewhat confused and, well, messy. One has to ask, why do people not come to church on a Sunday morning? I would venture to suggest it’s not because they simply don’t have the time – you make time for what is important to you. As I highlighted in the quote from the MC website above, if people wanted to go they would be going by now. I’d suggest instead that it’s because they’re not Christian. In the past, the traditional way of reaching people who don’t come to church is to hold evangelistic events or otherwise share the gospel with them, to help them understand the gospel, make a commitment to Christ and join the church family. The point is, people who don’t already come to church are being encouraged to consider the claims of Christ and then join an existing church family.

This is what I don’t get about Messy Church: I think Messy Church would be a fantastic evangelistic tool. I just struggle to see it as a church.

Another question I have about Messy Church which cuts deeply to the heart of the matter: does Messy Church actually introduce people to Jesus? Here’s the thing. The Messy Church philosophy seems to assume that people would just love to come to church if only they could find a time and a place which suited them. People don’t come on a Sunday morning because they’re busy or it’s inconvenient – hold it on a Saturday afternoon, people will love it. People would just jump at the chance to get to know Jesus, given a convenient time and format.

However, this is not how the gospels portray Jesus. Jesus is always a deeply divisive figure. At the end of John chapter 6, some of Jesus’ disciples said: “This is a hard teaching. Who can accept it?” (v60), and then: “From this time many of his disciples turned back and no longer followed him.” (v66) In other words, people who had the real, living, breathing Jesus in front of them couldn’t accept his teaching and turned back! It wasn’t a problem of finding a convenient time – it was that his teaching was unacceptable to them. In the very next chapter, just a few verses on, Jesus says: “The world cannot hate you, but it hates me because I testify that its works are evil.” (John 7:7) So Jesus says that the world actually hates him – because he testifies that what it does is evil. 

As I said, Jesus is a deeply divisive figure: Jesus is not someone whose teaching is inoffensive and all about ‘love your neighbour’ – he testifies about us that we are sinful, that our sin is offensive to a holy God, and that we need to repent of our sin and come to him for forgiveness and seek to live our lives with him as Lord. This is a message which the world finds deeply offensive! Paul says in 1 Corinthians 1:18-25 that the message of the cross is “foolishness to those who are perishing” – the Christian message looks bizarre and ridiculous to the world which is blind to God.

And this is the heart of the matter with Messy Church: what worries me with Messy Church (as a separate congregation) is that people come along because kids enjoy the crafts, the Bible story, the meal – it’s a fun thing to do together as a family. But by its nature it never really gets to the heart of the matter: to actually testifying that our deeds are evil and that God commands all of us to repent and believe in the gospel. I think a lot of people have a craving for some kind of spirituality in their lives – perfectly natural, as Augustine said ‘O Lord, you have made us for yourself and our hearts are restless above all things until they find their rest in you.’ However, I think Messy Church – rather than helping people – might actually hinder: it helps to fill the void in the ‘God-shaped hole’ in someone’s life without ever encouraging them to do what God requires. In other words, Messy Church could actually hinder the gospel.

This Sunday I am preaching on Matthew 7:13-14, where Jesus talks about two roads – the broad road which leads to destruction, and the narrow road which leads to life. If we do not warn people about the broad road which leads to destruction, then we are not showing them love. To love someone means to warn them of the danger they are in, in this case – the danger we are all in if we do not repent and believe in the gospel. If people are never warned at Messy Church about the broad road which leads to destruction, and are never encouraged to seek the narrow way of repentance and faith in Christ, then that is not the gospel and that is most definitely not introducing people to Jesus.

So, to conclude, I have a real problem with Messy Church as church in itself. I think it would work well as an evangelistic tool, provided that the gospel was presented clearly. But I have big problems with the way it is presented by many in the church as the solution to our problem of getting families involved – it may be creating more problems.