In the spring of 2024, St. James, Dundas, began the work of listening and discernment that would eventually result in the launch of a new Messy Church. They did this through MAP 2.0, weekly prayer group meetings, neighbourhood walks, community events, and ongoing informal listening among families and caregivers. These practices directly shaped the emergence of Messy Church as a missionally appropriate response.
What is Messy Church?
Messy Church is a family-friendly, intergenerational, creative exploration of faith. Importantly, this is not just another activity for church kids. Rather, it is an opportunity for unchurched and dechurched families, and those on the fringes of traditional Sunday morning worship, to encounter the Gospel and participate in Christ-centered community.
Typically, a Messy Church event lasts around two hours, with roughly one hour of that time being devoted to “exploration”. When you come to Messy Church, you will find around six to ten tables set up with different ways to interact with a specific Bible story or a Biblical theme, including craft tables, tables with colouring pages, and at St. James, we have added a Lego table, creative prayer practices, and other interactive games and activities. This offers an opportunity for kids and parents (or grandparents) to explore faith together. These activities are largely aimed at children and youth, and at St. James, we are excited by the challenge of figuring out how to nurture adult faith formation alongside our younger community members.
Following this, we come together to share a Bible story, have a short time of sharing and discussion, and pray together before sharing a meal. At our December gathering, our worship time involved telling the story of Jesus’ birth in an interactive way that involved passing a small, wrapped gift around a circle. We ended with a creative prayer practice, writing words that represented where we needed God’s light in the coming year on construction paper stars, praying over them, and hanging them up in the nursery nook in the sanctuary.
Creativity as a Medium for Mission
My own family first encountered Messy Church when my twins were toddlers, and we could barely make it to Sunday morning church before the Eucharist (even though we lived only three blocks away). During this period in our lives, Messy Church was a lifeline, offering us love, community, and spiritual depth in a time when the rest of our lives looked like chaos.
Messy Church showed us the best of hospitality, in a meal provided on a weeknight – that I didn’t have to prepare myself! – and all the clean-up is done. It showed us the best of community, as we met other families, and the children could run and shout and build and wreck together. We are still close friends with some of those families, even long after that first Messy Church stopped running. It showed us how creativity can be a medium for mission, through the crafts that reinforced Biblical lessons, to building and playing with a (nearly) life-size paper mache empty tomb at Easter, to escaping from a table-turned-whale in our Jonah and the whale story, to enacting the story of Noah’s Ark and then gleefully destroying the giant-cardboard-box-turned-ark when the story was over. And it showed us the best of love, as we felt loved and accepted and like we belonged, even when we were late, or loud, or messy, or didn’t fit into the expectations that we encountered elsewhere.
In this period of our lives, Messy Church is like an opportunity: an opportunity to encounter Christ in an unconventional fashion, when some of us (or at times all of us) feel like we just can’t sit still through a traditional worship service, or when we feel an itch to encounter and live out the Gospel in ways that are loud and messy and unusual, in ways that are sensory and involve our entire bodies, in ways that involve scavenger hunts and exploring nature and parties and prayer and spiritual disciplines. It is an opportunity to embrace the fact that Jesus can be found in the mess, in the outdoors, in games and shared meals.
Unchurched and Dechurched
During our pilot session in November, we had 32 participants, with over half of those being children and youth. We had multiple unchurched families join us, and some church families brought friends. Through creativity, story sharing, and exploring where we find God in stories and in our everyday lives, we hope to provide a space for those who do not fit into traditional church to encounter Jesus and experience the best of hospitality, community, creativity, and love.
If you are interested in this type of work and would like to be a part of the Messy Church team, we are looking to strengthen our core team. Contact [email protected] for more details.
Dr. Rebecca Vendetti is the first diocesan licensed lay missioner, instituted at St. James in Dundas in November 2025. Her ministry leading Messy Church offers creative prayer practices for kids, tweens, teens, and adults looking for unique and meaningful ways to explore their spirituality, discern their unique gifts to the world, and find a sense of community.
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