Family Prayer Time is designed to encourage and guide families into a habit of prayer, individually and together. Written in an interactive, user-friendly and jargon-free style, it offers simple prayers and addresses key questions such as 'Why should I pray?', 'Where should I pray?', 'How do I pray?' and 'What do I pray?'

Messy Church is a way of being church for families based around hospitality,creativity and celebration. It began in 2004 in the UK and has since caught the imagination of churches of all denominations around the world as they try to rethink how to be church for people who have little or no church connection. This DVD tells the story of Messy Church and explores the issues it raises through conversations with leaders from around the UK and meeting the children and adults who make up the congregations. It can be used to: Introduce the concept of Messy Church Help a new team understand what starting a Messy Church might entail Help an existing team think through some of the important issues faced by leadership teams as the Messy work goes on. It's fun, it's colourful, it's.... messy...

The ideals of the French Revolution inflamed a longing for liberty and equality within courageous, freethinking women of the era--women who played vital roles in the momentous events that reshaped their nation and the world. In "Liberty," Lucy Moore paints a vivid portrait of six extraordinary Frenchwomen from vastly different social and economic backgrounds who helped stoke the fervor and idealism of those years, and who risked everything to make their mark on history.

Germaine de Stael was a wealthy, passionate Parisian intellectual--as consumed by love affairs as she was by politics--who helped write the 1791 Constitution. Theroigne de Mericourt was an unhappy courtesan who fell in love with revolutionary ideals. Exuberant, decadent Theresia Tallien was a ruthless manipulator instrumental in engineering Robespierre's downfall. Their stories and others provide a fascinating new perspective on one of history's most turbulent epochs.

Holy Habits meets Messy Church! The Holy Habits approach explores Luke's model of church found in Acts 2:42-47, identifies ten habits and encourages the development of a way of life formed by them. This session material has been created to help churches explore the Holy Habits in a Messy Church context and live them out in whole-life, missional discipleship. messychurch.org.uk holyhabits.org.uk

When families experience bereavement and loss, it can be hard for the wider church community to know how best to support them. In this book, four experienced authors and practitioners offer intergenerational approaches for engaging with questions of death and life in a safe and supportive setting. The material guides church communities who are dealing with the death of loved ones and other situations of loss in talking together as a church family, in applying the Christian message of the resurrection in challenging situations, and in listening to each other and developing their own insights. The opening chapters offer an easy-to-read overview of issues of death and dying, and why this is such an important topic for churches. Part 2 consists of a series of five short theological reflections, exploring traditional images and the language that Christians have always used when talking about death. The five Messy Church sessions in Part 3 continue these themes, each offering material for a two-hour all-age Messy Church service followed by a meal together.

An affirming Easter gift for Messy Churches to give to their Messy families to use at home over Easter. This minibook aims to transfer the core values of Messy Church to the home and family context, encouraging families to talk together, be creative, be hospitable, be Christ-centred and celebratory, and including activities for all ages.

An all-in-one introduction to Messy Church. When you need to introduce your children's workers, family coordinators and church leaders to the concept of all-involving, activity-based, new-to-church worship, this is the quick-to-read resource that explains it all. Starting Your Messy Church is structured into bite-sized sections which take you through the essentials of how to construct a strategy and put your plans to start your own Messy Church ministry into action. The book includes (among many other things) checklists, milestones and questions to ask of a Messy Church that you might visit, together with an honest and down-to-earth look at the 'Things we wish we'd known' from experienced Messy Church practitioners.

Noooooo! The prospect of all-age worship can produce a cry of anguish from many people. It's time to admit that worship with all ages present is easy to do appallingly and difficult to do well. But it's also time to admit that a church which unthinkingly packs off any group, old or young, to worship and learn in another space every week could well be completely daft... This book is for those who sense that worshipping God together is probably a good thing, but are nervous of trying to lead their church towards that vision. It acknowledges that we don't live in a perfect world - or church - and that no one has all the answers. It also argues that you are the expert for the ways in which your church can best worship God, and helps you start to find those ways and adapt them for your local setting.

Twelve sessions for Messy Churches to do outdoors, created by a Messy Church Goes Wild writer team, enhanced by additions from scientists, and piloted in urban and rural Messy Churches. Session titles: Wild and wilderness!, Wet and wild!, Wild and rocky!, Wild and weedy!, Wild woods!, Wild weather!, Wild on the wing!, Wild and wiggly!, Wild safari!, Wild me!, Wild on the move!, Wild life! Unit writers: Aaron Jenkyn, Helen Laird, Dawn Savidge, Rachel Gotobed, Becky May, Lydia Harrison, Jane Leadbetter, Lucy Moore Scientists: Dave Gregory, John Sibley, Karen Fisher, Martin Hodson, Mike Morecroft, Graham Hartland, Andy Gosler, Mavis Crispin/Tom Hartman, David Clough, Richard Clarkson, Margot Hodson

Three complete Messy Church sessions for Advent, Christmas and Epiphany, together with a wealth of creative activities and crafts to extend the range of excitingly messy activities for your Messy Church. Sections include creative Christmas prayers, global action suggestions, games and competitions, Christmas food crafts and many other ideas to take you on into the New Year.

Where do you start with reading the Bible? Here's the perfect gift for Messy Church families and others new to Bible reading - a booklet of 50 bite-sized Bible passages, selected to cover the wide span of the Bible story across Old and New Testaments, with a reflection on each passage by Messy Church founder Lucy Moore. Written in a user-friendly and jargon-free style, What's in the Bible (for me)? is designed to encourage individuals and families alike to start reading the Bible and find out what it has to say to them. What's in the Bible (for me)? explores the big journey of the Bible. And maybe, as we see the bigger picture, it will help us understand our own journey.

Love God... Love your neighbour... Love yourself. The gospel is good news for messy people, young and old, and this resource is designed for those who are ready to make it their own. Written in an interactive, user-friendly and jargon-free style, it helps individuals and families alike to take the next steps in their Christian journey.

Based on the idea of the gospel being good news for messy people, young and old, Family Question Time is designed to help families talk about the basics of the Christian faith. Written in an interactive, user-friendly and jargon-free style, it offers information alongside encouragement to ask big questions, and contains suggestions about how to express a commitment to God.

An affirming Christmas gift for Messy Churches to give to their Messy families to use at home over the Christmas holiday period. This minibook aims to transfer the core values of Messy Church to the home and family context, encouraging families to talk together, be creative, be hospitable, be Christ-centred and celebratory, and including activities for all ages.

A practical exploration of the Christian principle of hospitality from the founder of Messy Church In Messy Hospitality Lucy Moore demonstrates how hospitality can be practised in Messy Church and other church contexts to promote mission and faith formation, addressing the theology of hospitality and how it can be expressed at the welcome table, the activity table, the Lord's Table, the meal table, and in the home. Also included are insights from the secular hospitality industry, how to train Messy Church teams in hospitality, audit-style questions for the reader to apply in their own context, and five complete session outlines for Messy Churches.

Messy Church Goes Wild is the movement within Messy Church which aims to encourage Messy Churches to meet God outdoors, love the natural world, experience a sense of awe and wonder there and be more eco-aware in all we do, both inside and out, as gathered and dispersed church, for the good of the planet. Edited by Messy Church founder Lucy Moore, this unique collection of wisdom and practical materials covers a range of topics from caring for animals and birds through living as an eco-friendly household to greening up your Messy Church activities and running an online session on Jesus in the wilderness. With chapters by Dave Bookless, Crystal Goetz, Dave Gregory, Graham Hartland, Jane Leadbetter, George Lings, Martyn Payne and Rachel Summers, and case studies from international contributors of all ages.

The bestselling author of 'Maharanis' recreates the lives of six remarkable women who, in a time of violent revolution, leapt at the chance to exercise their considerable charm, intelligence and acumen, and make their mark on history. Germaine de Stael was an intellectual and an aristocrat, equally obsessed by politics and love affairs, who is said to have helped write the 1791 Constitution. Her fellow salonniere, Mme Roland, was a bourgeois housewife who became a fervent and influential revolutionary, until Robespierre's regime sent her to the guillotine. While female intellectuals sipped wine in their salons, their working class counterparts patrolled the streets of Paris with pistols in their belts. Theroigne de Mericourt was an ill-treated mistress when she fell in love with revolutionary ideals and became an ardent anti-royalist until a mob beating by 'sans-culottes' ended her activism. The mob in question was made up of members of the Society of Revolutionary Republican Women, whose founder, Pauline Leon, agitated for women's rights. After the sans-culottes came the 'sans-chemises' - the glamorous (often skimpily clad) merveilleuses. Decadent Theresia Tallien combined sexual license with the secular amorality of the new Republic and reportedly helped engineer Robespierre's downfall. Her only rival for beauty was Juliette Recamier, whose elegance made her salons the most sought-after in Paris. When she refused Napoleon's advances she was exiled from the city until his fall. Writing with vigour and passion, Lucy Moore reanimates these witty salonnieres, fervent citoyennes and glittering merveilleuses to illuminate the brief, hopeful period in which the Revolution seemed to offer them the freedom they craved - and the ways in which it failed.

One individual chapter of this popular book on Messy Church. Overflowing with creative ideas to draw the community together for fun, food, fellowship and worship, this resource book contains 15 themed programme outlines. Each outline has ideas for creative art and craft activities, meal plans and recipes for eating together and family-friendly worship. Messy Church grew out of one church's desire to reach out to those on the fringes of the church community and experience the love of Christ through creativity, fellowship and worship together. There is also a dedicated website at www.messychurch.org.uk which explains what Messy Church is, why it got started and who is doing it now.

Equipping your Messy team to pray and encourage others to do so, both within and outside the Messy Church context - Communicating prayer as a concept - Praying as a team in advance and on the day - Prayer ideas for the activity time, celebration time, and at home as a family - Ways of praying the Lord's Prayer - Ways to reimagine other traditional prayers - Creating a prayer space - A Messy Quiet Day outline

This book is a craft book with a difference! As well as bulging with craft ideas to inspire your creativity at Messy Church, it is also a journal to scribble in, doodle on and generally make your own. The intention is that it will become a scrapbook of conversations, messy moments and prayers - a part of everyday life at home where you can sketch in your own ideas, list useful websites, make notes, reflect on spiritual moments, and journal your Messy Church journey.

Described as being 'deeply serious about discipleship', Messy Church has much to share, as well as much still to learn. As the fastest-growing fresh expression of church in the UK, Messy Church has learnt a thing or two about discipleship since its beginnings in 2004. This collection of perspectives, edited by Messy Church founder Lucy Moore, brings academic analysis and practitioner wisdom to bear on a key question for today's church, capturing the latest thinking and learning from the Messy Church context. Individual chapters examine each of the core Messy Church values and how these work in practice to promote discipleship.

Holy Habits is an initiative to nurture Christian discipleship. It explores Luke's model of church found in Acts 2:42-47, identifies ten habits and encourages the development of a way of life formed by them. The habits are: Biblical Teaching, Fellowship, Breaking Bread, Sharing Resources, Serving, Eating Together, Gladness and Generosity, Worship, Prayer and Making More Disciples. These Bible reading notes have been developed to help churches and individuals explore the Holy Habits through prayerful engagement with the Bible and live them out in whole-life, missional discipleship.

Wanting to go deeper in your journey as a Messy Church leader or helper, or are you just curious about what makes Messy Church a way of being church together? This accessible booklet contains 31 short Bible passages, with a reflection on each passage by Messy Church founder Lucy Moore, exploring the core values of Messy Church and reinforcing the creativity, hospitality, joy, inclusivity and character of Jesus.

***A Waterstones Best Books of 2022 pick*** The story of the pioneering anthropologists and their adventures among civilisations that were first thought of as being primitive and savage. What they discovered, however, would change the way we think about ourselves. In the late nineteenth century, when non-European societies were seen as 'living fossils' offering an insight into how Western civilisation had evolved, anthropology was a thrilling new discipline which attracted the brightest minds of the academic world. But, by the middle of the twentieth century, colonialism was recognised as being inextricably linked to exploitation and outdated labels like 'savage' were inconceivable when so-called 'civilised' man had wreaked such devastation across two world wars. Focusing on twelve key European and American anthropologists working in the field, from Franz Boas on Baffin Island in the 1880s to Claude Lévi-Strauss in Brazil fifty years later, Lucy Moore explores the brief flowering of anthropology as a quasi-scientific area of study with all its insights and ambivalence. In Search of Us tells the story of the men and women whose observations of the 'other' would transform attitudes about race, gender equality, sexual liberation, parenting and tolerance in ways they had never anticipated. In an enthralling, perceptive narrative, Moore shows how these radical anthropologists were inspired by their time in the furthest-flung reaches of the known world, becoming pioneers of a new way of thinking. In the end, their legacy is less about understanding foreign cultures and more about their attempts to persuade human beings to look at one another with eyes washed free from prejudice. Their intention may have been to explain what they saw as the primitive world to the civilised one but they ended up changing the way people viewed themselves - at least for a time.

'He achieves the miraculous,' the sculptor Auguste Rodin wrote of dancer Vaslav Nijinsky. 'He embodies all the beauty of classical frescoes and statues'. Like so many since, Rodin recognised that in Nijinsky classical ballet had one of the greatest and most original artists of the twentieth century, in any genre. Immersed in the world of dance from his childhood, he found his natural home in the Imperial Theatre and the Ballets Russes, he had a powerful sponsor in Sergei Diaghilev - until a dramatic and public failure ended his career and set him on a route to madness. As a dancer, he was acclaimed as godlike for his extraordinary grace and elevation, but the opening of Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring saw furious brawls between admirers of his radically unballetic choreography and horrified traditionalists. Nijinsky's story has lost none of its power to shock, fascinate and move. Adored and reviled in his lifetime, his phenomenal talent was shadowed by schizophrenia and an intense but destructive relationship with his lover, Diaghilev. 'I am alive' he wrote in his diary, 'and so I suffer'. In the first biography for forty years, Lucy Moore examines a career defined by two forces - inspired performance and an equally headline-grabbing talent for controversy, which tells us much about both genius and madness. This is the full story of one of the greatest figures of the twentieth century, comparable to the work of Rosamund Bartlett or Sjeng Scheijen.