What can a distressed working parent do with kids when infants and primary school's have pupil free days? St Paul's, Castle Hill to the rescue! - with a ‘super’ idea this term.

"Supaday' is Castle Hill Anglican activity day for children from Kindergarten to Year 6 running from 8.30am to 5pm on pupil free days. 

The first trial of the idea has been such a "hugely exciting' success says St Paul's children's pastor Linda Stephens, that the church has already taken registrations for Term Three's pupil free day on July 18.

Numbers exceeded organiser's expectations, with children turned away because of the legal requirements about staff-child ratios.

In the end over 150 children attended, with only 38 of them from St Paul's families.

More than one third of parents told organisers they had no church affiliation whatsoever.
“Our prayers are definitely answered!" Linda says. "In the weeks following Supaday we are seeing many families calling to ask for information on GFS " our girls ministry - on Explorers - our boys ministry - on Sunday morning "Kids Alive' and also our youth ministry "Crossfire'.

“In fact, we have already seen a number of children join these groups this term. This is very exciting for us!" she says.

Linda says the event is like a "lilypad' that allows the children to hop from School Scripture into Sunday church.

"We also want to maximize this opportunity by particularly focusing on kids from our Special Religious Education classes to give them another link to Jesus and his church," she says.

Linda visited as many SRE classes as possible to personally invite the children and to build excitement about the day.

She also put advertising material in the local McDonalds and encouraged St Paul's own working parents to register a non-church attending child when booking-in their own kids.

"I am particularly excited that the schools with the most numbers attending were state schools from our SRE area," she says.

But the day has produced far more than just an expanded list of contacts.

"We decided that it was better to make the most of this opportunity and to talk to the children about Jesus and His call on their lives," says Linda.

Linda's team have been handing out ‘show-bags’ to kids who wanted to know more about Jesus.

The bags include the Matthias Media kids’ tract "Who is the King?', a gospel of Mark, the CEP gospel tract "Joining God's family' and a booklet on growing as a Christian.

And what do kid's think of Supaday?

Linda says she overheard one boy describing the event to his friend.

“What's that?” he asked, which set the first boy running as fast as he could to grab an advertising brochure.

“Here " it's excellent! It's so much fun. You have to come to the next one!"

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