Pirates, questions and knowing Christ

For more than a decade, St Christopher’s Tawa has hosted a children’s holiday programme during the first week of the September/October school holidays. This year, with the church building under reconstruction, the programme simply moved down the road.

Thanks to the generous hospitality of the Tawa Salvation Army, the team had a temporary home for the week and the tradition could continue.

This year the children became Landlubbers, following a pirate-themed Scripture Union programme exploring Paul’s letter to the Philippians.

Across five mornings, they were introduced to Jesus through the words and experiences of Paul. There was singing and dancing, craft, games, discussion and drama, with plenty of fun along the way.

One of the highlights was the daily Message in a Bottle. Jokes, riddles, banter and questions from the children were pulled from a bottle and read aloud. There were plenty of laughs, but the bottle also produced some surprisingly big questions: Who is Jesus? What did his death achieve? What sort of authority does the Bible have? Why is there suffering?

The soundtrack to it all was a sea shanty composed especially for the week by local parishioner Rob Edgecombe. It drew, loosely perhaps, on Philippians 3, where Paul writes of his all-consuming desire to know Christ.

Listen here