Children's Liturgy, Sunday September 27th 2009

The FOURTH WEEK of CREATIONTIDE.

Today our subject was water. We talked about how we need it for all life and how lucky we are in this country to be able to turn on taps to get it whenever we want. There are countries where children spend most of their day fetching water. We had a collection of buckets and everyone tried lifting them to see how heavy they were when filled with water.

We also talked about the way some places on earth are changing because people have acted in ways which change the climate, so rivers run dry, or there are sudden floods. Also animals and plants die out.

We wanted to make the adults in church think about what they could do to look after the environment. We have told them about carbon footprints, but not many of them have filled in their Creationtide Basket leaflets.

When we went back into church, one child went in alone first and asked the adults to think for two minutes about a lovely place they enjoyed when they were a child. Then, as they thought, the other children walked round the church in silence, carrying buckets of water, which they placed on the altar. This is what we said to them:

Here is a poster which Shivani designed during our liturgy.

Then we told the adults other things we had discovered during this week's liturgy.

We had found out how much water it takes to grow a kilo of fruit, to keep a sheep alive and for the lifetime of a cow! We ourselves are two thirds water!

Gail has filled in her Creationtide sheet. She is a keen gardener and has two compost heaps, so she doesn't burn or throw away waste. She recycles by using old tights cut up into strips to tie up plants in her garden. She has planted a lot of vegetables for next year, so she won't need them to travel to her in lorries using up petrol. They will not arrive wrapped in plastic packaging. She also has a water butt to collect rainwater.

Here are some more tips for the garden:

During the liturgy, one of the older girls made up this clever acrostic.

We laughed when we read the sheet Bob had filled in- it said he couldn't remember the last time he had a bath....but he takes showers- it uses far less water to take a shower than to have a bath. Bob serves up the teas and coffees after mass. He told us later that several children had pulled his leg about never having baths. He seems clean when he hands out the biscuits!

Here is a poster produced by Peter Coles for UNESCO- if you would like to see a high resolution version, please contact photobank@unesco.org