Rev Jimmy Luey from the Anglican Chinese Mission is celebrating the connection amongst a growing group of young families through the weekly Messy Church ministry.

A group of musicians, service leaders and others meet to pray before each Messy Church service, which includes an hour of activities for children based around a theme from the lectionary, followed by a story, singing and a meal.

Messy Church has also been effective at providing opportunities to invite participants into other church contexts. “It enables initiations to other groups, including women’s groups, small groups, and Mother’s fellowship,” Jimmy says.

Also, by finishing with a meal, parents have an opportunity to connect with church members in their own language, and relationships have developed from there.

Jimmy says, five years ago they identified a need for more young families in their church and that changes in the Chinese community from predominantly Cantonese-speaking families to increased numbers of Mandarin-speaking was leading them to want to engage more with that part of the community.

At the same time a Sunday afternoon church-run community basketball club was growing rapidly with 30-40 children and a university language school joining its membership. Jimmy says they decided to start Messy Church as a way of engaging these new families, and in doing so brought together the church’s English-speaking and Chinese-speaking congregations, with the English-speaking members leading the service, and Chinese-speaking providing the meal at the end and speaking to the Chinese families.

They were invited by Rev Paul McIntosh of the Parish of Northland-Wilton to visit their parish’s Messy Church to see how they ran it and this was a helpful way of getting ideas of how to approach it at the Anglican Mission.