Who is God? at Ravenmeol's Community Centre

Messy Church began the new year by exploring the theme of 'who is God?' A variety of art and craft activities were used to show different aspects of God. These were then used in our worship to help illustrate how great God is. We welcomed new families and familiar ones too, in what proved to be a lively and fun afternoon learning about God.

The Activities
Painting an invisible God:
Just because we can't see God doesn't mean He isn't there. He is everywhere and always ready to listen to us and help us. (Matthew 28:20)
This activity involved drawing a picture of God or what God means to us, using a colourless wax crayon. The picture is revealed by painting over it because the wax parts repell the paint.

Making a pasta tree:
God made the world (genesis 1:11)

Here we explored how God makes all the wonderful trees and plants grow. Using pasta and tissue paper we made our own trees and plants.

Decorating heart shaped biscuits:
God loves each one of us( John 3:16).

One of the Messy Church team baked lots of lovely shortbread hearts for everyone to decorate. This was a very popular activity, we had some lovely creations but they didn't last very long!

Making a crown:
God is our King (matthew 21:5).

Using coloured card and lots of sparkly decorations we made our own crowns. There were princes, princesses and even an emporer parading around the hall.

Making a Dove Mobile:
A dove is a symbol of peace and God gives us peace (John 14:27).

This activity, although quite fiddly, produced some lovely results. I'm sure there will be lots of people feeling peaceful when they look at their dove mobiles.

Bible Table:
Many different types of Bibles; traditional, comic strip, youth and story bible. This was a great opportunity to have a look at lots of different types of bibles and colour in some bible story sheets too.

Flower arranging:
Gods creation is wonderful: flowers, trees and the whole earth made by God (Genesis 1:31)

This was a very popular activity and we saw some very beautiful arrangements.

Making a shield:
God protects us (Ephesians).

Protection is just one of the many things that God does for us. This task asked us to think about all the different things that God means to us and then draw or write them in the different sections of a shield template.

The worship
After an hour of activities, we began our time of celebration and worship with our welcome song. Our regular Messy Church goers are really getting good at this one.

The talk, this time, looked at all the different things that we had made during the activity section and how they related to God and his love for us. To show just how big and great God is, Lesley told us that despite our universe being too big to imagine, God's love is so much bigger!

After the worship, we tucked in to hot dogs followed by an assortment of delicious cakes! During the supper we were able to enjoy a special time of fellowship which included birthday celebrations and lots of chat.