A REPORT this week shows Penryn Town Council treading a very fine line between funding a children’s club and funding a religious organisation, and your pal the skipper feels they may have just crossed it.

In a debate on Monday, councillors looking at funding for a children’s holiday club run by the Methodist church, including bible studies, were told grants are explicitly not to be used for religious purposes.

Despite this, and despite calls for the application to be resubmitted, the council approved the payment of money to what is, in essence, a special interest group.

One councillor even said he was not sure if it was religious education or religious propaganda, but that he supported it anyway. The skipper asks, if this had been a Muslim group asking to use taxpayers’ money for proselytising, would the council have been so accommodating?

While in terms of taxpayer money spent £50 might pale into insignificance next to the £1,700 the church requested in June for roof repairs, one could be considered as preserving part of a Penryn landmark, while the other is back door funding for infant brainwashing.

Nor is this an attack on funding for all religious groups carrying out activities, as the Highway Church also received funding from the council. The difference being that their money was for work in the wider community.

Does Penryn’s Methodist Church have a very small congregation, or a very large holiday club? That’s another question the skipper wants answered as its two recent applications gave the number of members of both the chapel and the holiday club as 45.

If this really is the case, simply charging 20p more per session at the holiday club – of which there were five at a cost of £1.50 a time – would have more than covered the costs. Or perhaps the club isn’t serving quite so many members of the community as it would like to suggest.