Staff Retreat & Back to School Party

We had our first staff retreat this week. I referred to it as a "pray and play" retreat. The goal was to rest, have fun, debrief the past year and prepare ourselves, physically, mentally and spiritually for the coming year. We invited staff and families to attend.

It was a huge success in my opinion. It seemed like everyone really did relax, which is not always easy considering several of us have workaholic tendencies. We also had some really good discussions about how to prepare ourselves and how to put some spiritually displines in our lives.

We have an awesome staff at our church. We don't always agree on how we should do things. In fact our staff meetings can be pretty intense at times. But we are always unified and that unity is reflected in the rest of the church.

By the way, we accidentally double booked our retreat with a major event at our church. We were hosting a "Back to School Party" for 90 kids from low income families in our community. We collected school supplies for them and at the party we helped them pack their new backpacks with the supplies they were going to need for school.

With the execption of one, our entire staff was on the retreat during this event.

Some churches have staff that are willing to give up control and let lay leaders have ownership of ministry. And some churches have lay leaders who want to take ownership of ministry. Our church is fortunate enough to have both.