God loves messy

Philip Noble, retired Episcopalian Rector, amateur scientist, sculptor with bubbles, sometime clown was sitting on the church floor constructing a tractor from cereal boxes and round plastic lids. It’s my most vivid recollection of last Sunday’s Messy Church at Hilton in Inverness.

Philip was one of a group of children and adults. Some like him were making tractors, some were working on a big collage representing harvest, some were building barns with Lego or with biscuits and icing, some were outlining fruit and vegetables on a sheet of paper, each outline framing a prayer.

The Messy Church concept, used by many churches across the country aims to grow the bonds between a church and its community. These days, many of us have no idea what goes on inside church buildings. Others of us retain memories of childhood church attendance which has left the sense that whatever our longing for meaning, whatever our questions about God, church is completely irrelevant.

Messy Church invites us to crowd into the church building with our children. There are crafts loosely linked to a spiritual theme, a lively talk about Jesus, and then everyone shares a meal and chats. It doesn’t give the whole experience of church, but it’s an excellent taster.

When everyone went through to eat last Sunday, they left behind a room strewn with scattered Lego bricks, torn cardboard, painty scraps of newspaper, milk bottle tops and pieces of hard pasta. I guess that’s why they call it ‘Messy Church.’

But it made me think of other ways in which, these days, church is messy.

There is a place for formality in church, for the age-old rituals which give us a sense of continuity and comfort, for awe-driven worship of the God who is great and good beyond our capacity to imagine.

But there is room too for informality, for services where not everything is planned in advance, structured and controlled, where there’s space for spontaneity and creativity in openness to the God who always breaks out of the boxes in which we try to contain God.  At times it can seem messy.

And church is messy in the sense that we as God’s followers can be real with one another.  We don’t have to pretend we’re perfect and have our lives all sorted out. We know ourselves to be far from perfect. We mess up every day. And so, when we’re thinking clearly, we welcome people whose lives are messy because we have learned that God accepts us as we are, that we don’t need to sort ourselves out before God will love us because God loves us already.

This is one of the central convictions of the Christian faith: church is about messy people journeying together with God, growing less messy as they travel.

Church is also messy in the sense of being fuzzy at the edges. In the old days there was much talk of those who were ‘in’ and those who were ‘out’, of some whose faith was ‘genuine’ and others whose belief was somehow defective. Now many of us realise that we are all on a journey, each of us at a given moment either travelling towards God or away from God.

God challenges us to focus on Christ who is at the centre, and to encourage one another on our journeying. It is wrong to sit in judgement on others, for only God knows the point on the journey I have reached.

And church is messy finally, in that it turns social structures on their head. At Hilton Church last Sunday the minister was cooking and assisting with the washing up; a theologian helped set up the cage football and enjoyed a kick-around; a retired Rector got sticky with glue. Christianity subverts hierarchies. We are all equal, in community with one another, using the gifts God has given us to show love and compassion to others, to bring joy.

After Messy Church was over, the premises were soon tidy again thanks to the cleaning team. But I wonder – will God sort the mess, or will the dimension beyond this life be messy?

We believe God will utterly sort the mess of darkness and bad stuff in our lives, and the vicious wounds life has inflicted on us – in fact this healing has already begun within us.

But Sunday’s mess was the mess of creativity, trial and error, exuberant play, fun and glory. An artist’s studio is messy. A poet’s manuscript is messy. A wild mountain-top is messy. A swirling galaxy is messy.

And I think again of Philip Noble, sitting on the floor with the cardboard tractor, not just helping the kids but enjoying sculpting in cardboard surrounded by mess, and I can’t help thinking that God loves messy.

(Christian Viewpoint column from the Highland News dated 25th September 2014)