Our staff took a retreat last week. The purpose of the retreat was for some vision casting and a little planning, but mostly for group connection and time apart. Due to constraints of some part-time staff and other schedules, we scheduled a one day event.
The payoff was immediate and big. More community, stronger commitment, modeling to the church, corporate Sabbath and time for conversations that don’t surface in staff meetings.
Here’s the schedule for the all day staff retreat:
7:45 am – depart on church bus
7:50 am – visit one of the church member’s new business
8:20 am – breakfast at a local restaurant (paid for)
9:30 am – arrived at the neighboring town’s library where we reserved (for free) the meeting room for three hours.
From 9:00 – 12:00 we answered a couple get to know you questions such as “tell us the story behind your name”.
We then went through this ten item checklist for church staff and how we were doing with each as a staff team. It produced conversation until lunch.
12:00 pm – walked to a restaurant for lunch and intentionally sat in 2-4 person groups to talk (lunch was paid for)
1:15 pm – we got on the bus and headed to one of the parks, hiked, played and walked around until about 2:30.
2:30 pm – we met around benches, sang a couple worship songs and had a brief scripture devotion on Matt. 6:33.
3:00 pm – drove to the local ice cream shop, bought ice cream and visited some more (church paid for ice cream)
4:00 pm – back to church and the day was done.
I’m not sure of the total cost for the day, but it was cheaper than a weekend retreat with lodging. And it was a simple, doable gift to the staff team. The timing of the day was perfect as we have included a new person on our church staff and a couple other roles have changed.
Any church staff team would benefit from such a day. If you are a large church staff, you could break into departments or smaller groups. If you are the sole pastor in your church, you could create a day like this for your church leadership board or elder team. If you are a church with only two or three staff members, you could do a combination of paid staff and key volunteer / board members.
Great going to the leaders in our church staff who arranged a refreshing corporate Sabbath for our church staff. We should do this every Monday!
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