Messy Church in Normandy

Sometime in 2010 (or maybe even late 2009) Rob was praying and felt that the Lord was saying that The-River would be involved in planting a church in Normandy – Northern France. Rob had never been to Normandy, knew no one in Normandy, and does not speak French!! He also had a sense of the place where we would be working. He thought that it would sound like “Sausage” or “Saucisson” or something like that – but that it definitely began with an ‘S’.

In August 2010 Rob delivered a seminar about ‘Messy Church’ at the Detling Summer Conference. At the end of the meeting several people came to ask questions. One of the couples was Francis and Diane Dognon. They were very excited about ‘Messy Church’, having done some outreach that summer, and were looking to run more ‘Messy Style’ events to reach out to a housing estate within their town.

After we had chatted and agreed to meet up later, Vicky said to Rob: “You know where they are from, don’t you? NORMANDY!” Rob had, embarrassingly, completely forgotten about this prophecy. When we later talked again to Francis and Diane, we realised that the church was called ‘La Source’!!

Francis and Diane came and visited us at The-River the following Sunday, and by October The-River had sent a team to Lisieux in Normandy to help run an outreach to ‘Hauteville’. Hauteville is a housing estate (cite) of about 9000 people. Most of the adults on the estate are unemployed, and many of the children do not attend school.

There was an outreach in Hauteville from Wednesday to Saturday, and then a ‘Light Party’ at the church on Saturday night. The-River is committed to helping with this work in whatever way we can, and we anticipate going back to Hauteville to support La Source.

We are holding on to the prophetic word that we will be involved in a church plant in Normandy.

Neil Blain, 08/06/2011