One of my worship team has a website that allows full-text searching of Songs of Fellowship and Sing Glory, which have been important songbook resources for our church in the past. That allows me to say with confidence that there aren’t any worship songs in those books which mention sardines, the creature we are looking at in tomorrow’s Toddlers’ church session. The story will be about Jesus asking fishermen to cast their nets out on the other side of the boat, even though they had been fishing all night without catching a thing.

I don’t know what song we will use but I have offered up this little ditty (words copyright me, ten minutes ago), sung to the traditional tune ‘Row, Row, Row Your Boat’:

Row, row, row your boat
Gently on the lake
Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily
But you haven’t caught a hake!

Cast, cast, cast your nets
Where the saviour deems
Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily
You’ll be flooded with sardines!

Praise, praise, praise the Lord
On both sea and shore
Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily
With all wonder and with awe!

I’m not sure how it would float in a regular church service but it has the silly sounds and simple tune of many songs for young children with just a little bit of bible story and theology worked in there.