In 2016 I was co-organising the children’s work for my church’s weekend away. Where possible, we wanted to cover the same theme that the adults looked at, but then they chose this title for the weekend ‘Looking in Back in Thankfulness and Looking Forward in Dependence’ which doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, and 4 -12 year olds don’t always carry the kind of context which makes them able to talk about church life in those terms.
After some careful thought we decided to take the beginning of the book of Joshua as our theme. Standing on the boundaries of the Promised Land he must look back at the rescue from Egypt and all that God did for them in the desert, and he can look forward to all the goodness of the land God has promised them and look out for the dangers that are sure to come. Perfect! I enjoyed planning and running that very much, we even wrote a song, in which we rhyme way with quail.
Perhaps it was these fond memories that made my brain leap to Joshua when we needed a theme for a holiday club in the autumn of 2021. The children’s pastor here wanted to do something Old Testament, because all of our online videos were stories out of the Gospels and my notes say that my first option was doing several OT heroes whose lives all point to Jesus (much like the New and Better series). But we ended up running with that theme in our Sunday school classes, across all campuses, and we just so happened to get to Joshua by the time the holidays came round!
I could have used some of the material from the 2016 weekend away, as I’m now in a different country so it would have been new for the kids, but while there’s some natural crossover I wrote 5 days of brand new material! I do really love that new project feeling, so of course I started a new one, but I also get those same vibes from the Israelites standing on the edge of the Promised Land.
Also, you can see in Jesus is the New and Better Joshua that the parallels to the one who brings us into a new land are great, and natural, and easy to make and if there’s something I love more than talking about Joshua, it’s talking about Jesus.
That’s how Joshua turned out to be my accidental favourite.