2023
A Mighty Fortress
On Monday the third of July 2023, 22 campers and 17 leaders set out on a new adventure. After a steep journey up the mountain to Camp Fletcher, we quickly began our work of becoming Heroes through developing our endurance on a bushwalk to two different waterfalls! Thankfully, we took the time to enjoy a hearty feast for our hard work, then spent the evening learning many skills that allowed the campers to begin training to advance from the lowest rank of peasants during Monday Night games. Given the medieval theme of the camp, we took the time to study nations and kings from the bible. On Monday, we looked at Joshua (chapter 6) and how the Lord brought down the walls of Jericho to deliver his chosen people: the Isrealites. God’s might tumbles Jericho’s walls.
Waking the next morning as newly annointed knights, we enjoyed a Heroes Quest where campers developed the many skills that heroes need with activities aimed to develop skills such as bard training, tests of balance, endurance, accuracy and speed, and even opportunities to challenge the leaders and beat them at their own game! We made paper chains and aqueducts for ping pong balls, practiced our accuracy through ring toss, and practiced keeping balloons in the air. On Tuesday, we opened the bible to look at King Hezekiah (2 Kings 18-19) and his faith in the Lord to protect Jerusalem from the Assyrians. In the evening after chapel and dinner, we followed Hiccup and his friends as they put some of the skills we had learnt into practice, watching How to Train Your Dragon in a movie night.
Waking up bright and early on Wednesday morning, we dressed in our oldest clothes as we prepared to get messy. We challenged each other as teams worked together to come out with the messiest clothes around! Through blindly touching sardines and cold 2-minute noodles, face-planting flour in search of gummy snakes, playing Go Go Stop with hairspray, spreading the bubonic plague using shaving cream and Cheeto balls, and helping each other eat cereal from behind, the kids definitely took the challenge to heart! After a brief morning tea break of pizza, we got EVEN MESSIER with paint twister, fishing for toy soldiers with our toes, passing water over our heads into our friends’ buckets (or rather, onto our friends), played some messy trivia, and went slip and sliding. The messy games ended with a giant slime fight (which the leaders were happy to see the kids getting into because the slime was made from soap flakes and water)! Messy and content, we cleaned up ready for the rest of the day. In our studies on Wednesday, we looked at King Josiah (2 Kings 22-23) who found the word of God in the temple and repented because his word is true and powerful. Finally, we finished the day with an evening walk down to see the glowworms, admiring the glories of God’s creation.
Thursday was a jam packed day of activity. In the morning we took the time to make different medieval themed crafts: catapults, swords and painted rocks to remind us that the Lord is our rock - something the kids were repeating daily in our memory verse, Psalms 18:2. The afternoon saw the children pick up archery as they learnt how to use bows and arrows with fun exercises and competitions out on the oval. On Thursday we were introduced to the final King discussed during the week - King Jesus - and his not so grand entrance into the city (Luke 19). This lead into our campfire talk where we talked about how God is the one true King who knows what is best for us. He loves us, but when we don’t listen to his perfect plan, and do things wrong, for us it breaks our relationship with him (Luke 23). God sent his son Jesus to live a perfect life and die in our place, to make all our wrongs right! Because of this, we are given the gift of a right relationship with God - but it is up to us to accept this gift. Thursday night is an opportunity for children to respond and accept this gift. We pray to say sorry to God for the things we have done, thank you for sending Jesus to make things right, and please forgive us and help us to live the rest of our lives for him. This year, we had 21 campers either pray this for the first time or recommit to God with this prayer.
By Friday of camp, everyone is always super tired from such a busy schedule, yet, it also feels like we only arrived yesterday because the time has flown by so quickly! Packing up cabins and sharing new memories with friends made this week is bittersweet but the kids talk about plans with each other to come back the following year so they can do it all over again. Friday is also the day where the kids find out who the mystery cabin inspector who reports on how tidy the cabins are each day to encourage friendly competition. This year, it was a highly anticipated reveal as kids were given the opportunity to offer additional evidence not heard in cabin reports and have their scores changed accordingly, so when Greg was revealed as the inspector the cheers of excitement were deafening! We finished out the week by talking about how in every passage we looked at, God’s name was declared (Joshua 6:27, 2 Kings 19:25, 2 Kings 23:2, Luke 19:37-38, Luke 23:39-43 and Luke 24:33-34), and it is our job to go and tell others about the Good News of Jesus!
