Entering into this year’s Season of Creation, a small crew of rangatahi and leaders spent the week together at ‘Create Camp’ run by Scripture Union NZ. This camp was focused on encouraging young people’s creativity as a way of connecting and worshipping God through our unique individual expressions and also in communal sharing and collaborating together.

The camp started off with an activity of creating art from ‘junk’, the rangatahi were given materials that would have otherwise been disposed of as waste such as old bottle caps, magazines and toilet rolls. This set the tone for the week that creativity is everywhere, there are so many things that as humans we use once and then dispose of. This process of creating junk art helped us creatively reframe our conception of waste and give it more than one life. This activity was also framed alongside the quote “prayer is a practice not a  performance.” This quote flowed through the rest of the camp as we leant into other creative pursuits serving as a constant reminder that the process and practice of creativity is equally, if not more important than the ‘final result.’ It is a joy and a privilege to be able to engage in the process of creation, just as God delighted in creating us and this land we inhabit.

We had the deep privilege of being hosted by Ngatiawa River Monastery for this camp which was a unique and fruitful experience for the young people. We joined their community for morning prayers each day, walking in the cold past the flowing rivers and misty mountains to sing songs and recite liturgy together. We also had lunch and dinner with them, lovingly prepared by Donna, who we are endlessly grateful to for filling our bellies with good kai day after day. The young people bore witness to and engaged with Ngatiawa’s way of intentional communal living, by doing dishes all together, composting our food waste, weeding and gardening around the native trees they had planted a year ago and having conversations intergenerationally around the dinner table.

Being removed from the busy world was such a gift, Ngatiawa’s rural location in combination with the young people’s phones being  handed in at the beginning of camp ensured that they were able to be as present as possible to the people and the environment they were surrounded by. We partook in some awesome creative practices such as turmeric printing which involved pressing leaves into a turmeric-solution covered paper and letting it develop out in the sun, wood cut print making, song writing, dance and photography. The young people’s creativity was nurtured by the sacred, special and safe natural environment of Ngatiawa River Monastery. The fruits of their explorations and expressions were then displayed at an end of camp showcase in front of the Ngatiawa community, SUNZ staff and family members.

This camp was a beacon of hope for me as a youth leader, reminding me of the beautiful and unique gifts each young person has to offer, the natural inclination for us as humans to create and to share our creations with others and how our environment nurtures our innate creativity and is an overt reflection of God’s abundant creative love.