Mission Afloat

Clarence Seaferers Festival

Bellerive, Howrah, Kingston, Wellspring, Hamilton and New Norfolk parishes were all represented in Mission Afloat’s latest public outreach at the Clarence Seafarers Festival at Kangaroo Bay, Bellerive on 25 October, either in preparation or in manning the boats and tent on the day.

Once again free wooden longboat rides (well, almost free – landlubbers coming aboard had to work their passage on the oars!), model boats and wooden bag tags were provided. Howrah’s Helen Phillips proved to be very competent at pokerwork on the bag tags.

We expanded our range of foam boats by adding warships and freighters to the tugs that proved so popular at the Wooden Boat Festival in February, and again we ran out late in the day.

Special thanks also to James Veltmeyer and his enthusiastic youth team and Dennis and Lois Quinn from St Mark’s Bellerive. Not forgetting Henry Nugteren who had the Herculean task of bringing the two boats up from Coningham, and taking them back again, a four-hour trip each way. (We went a bit soft on Henry this time and let him use an outboard motor instead of rowing!)

The Festival’s water activities organiser, Lyndall Edwards of the Clarence City Council, and also the MC, Andrew Colrain, enthusiastically expressed their thanks to Mission Afloat for once again helping out with their community event.

We, in turn, thank the contributions from the parishes, especially from people who are not Mission Afloat regulars, and we hope that, whatever the future holds for MAT, we can continue to work alongside other Anglican organisations in getting the church out among the people in the ‘marketplace’.

As guest speaker Richard Trist reminded us at the Missional Church, Transformed People event earlier in the month, the first step in Mission is to Engage with people, without which the following steps of Evangelism, Education (discipleship) and Empowering (training for mission) cannot happen.

Mission Afloat has been engaging with ‘the unchurched’ at our camps (over 3,000 schoolchildren in the last two years) and participation in events like this. With God’s help, we will continue to do so, despite our sadness at losing the use of Montgomery Park.

David Tulip

< Previous article | Next article >

Return to the table of contents