Super Saturday

One of the most common discussions that we hear about having house churches is "what to do with the kids". Since the group is smaller on Sundays, you don't have extra people to teach kids' classes and sometimes you don't even have space or enough kids to really make a class. As we have said earlier, we have a lot of kids in our house church and we try each Sunday to have a special story or activity for them. Sometimes it is done with the adults, too, (many of whom don't know the traditional Bible stories) and sometimes separately. In our family, we have seen a lot of spiritual growth in our kids since we have started having house churches. Maybe it's because they feel more included in the group or maybe because of the strong "family type" relationships that they have developed with the others in our group. Whatever the reason, it's been good for us.

One thing that kids do miss out on is being in a "Sunday School" environment every Sunday with other kids. To give the kids more opportunities like this, our network of house churches has started an activity that we call Super Saturday. Super Saturday is the first Saturday of each month. This year we are learning about the fruits of the Spirit, so each Saturday we cover a different fruit.

We start out singing with the kids and talking about the fruits of the Spirit and the specific fruit we will be studying that day.One day we had a visit from a confused tangerine who thought HE might be included in the fruits of the Spirit.Then we divide the kids up into three groups according to age and send them to three different stations - Bible story, arts and crafts, and games. Here are some pictures:

Learning about the Good Samaritan when we studied about LOVE.Here is our sister, Elke, who is part of another small church group here in Porto Alegre, the Evangelical Free Church. Since their group is small, they joined forces with us to provide this activity for the children. We hope more groups will be involved in the future. Elke did a great job of teaching about GENTLENESS in telling the story of Jesus washing the disciples' feet.

I told the story of Isaac and the wells (Genesis 26 if you aren't familiar with it) to illustrate a great example of PEACE. This dirt box with little figures was pretty exciting.

Here is our sister Rosana and the mother of one of our visitors to Super Saturday helping with art.

Elke and the kids doing another art project.These two decided to paint with their mouths. (Who knows why?)I think the games station is the most popular.

So far we have had around 15 kids participating on each Saturday. We have only had 3 Saturdays so far and we hope that this activity will continue to grow as more and more kids find out about it. One little boy, Lucas, who is a visitor has come every Saturday. This past week, I told the kids that I hoped that they had enjoyed the day and would come back the next time. Lucas then said with a big smile, "Oh I'm never going to stop coming here!". Thank you, Lord!