Reflecting On Our Sr. High Fall Retreat Part 1

I find myself very thankful for an excellent retreat this past weekend. Some excellent conversations and connections were had and made, some important truths were remembered, and some friendships were made and deepened. From my vantage point, it was great to see those and other beautiful moments happen over the weekend.

Our group joined the good people at Westminster Presbyterian from West Chester, PA on their annual fall retreat. Their youth director Greg Kilmovitz and their director of alternative worship, Jon Frost and I know each other from Biblical Seminary. (Faithful readers of the blog/twitter will recognize Jon as a member of my cohort and the recipient of the prestigious “Biblical Seminary Missional Student” award ;-) Back in April, the three of us and two other good friends went to see the NT Wright Conference at Wheaton and we really connected (it was sorta like a youth retreat, except for theology nerds). It was on our way home that Greg and I began talking about the possibility of doing a retreat like this with our respective groups. Though I knew it was a terrible mistake to ever partner with someone whose last name you could not pronounce, like how Kierkegaard taught about the absurdity of Abraham, I stepped out in faith.

Here’s the context of it – We both serve in suburban churches, contend with a bit of our denominational traditions and have high visions for student ministry. This means a lot of things. For one, some consider us boring because we quote Barth and Augustine to our students but we do it to attempt to communicate the rich history of the Church. On a good week, we even use the Old Testament ;-) Two, denominational traditions, as well as the histories of our respective local churches inform what we do. I do not intend to make this sound like a negative thing at all for there is a lot of goodness in this too, only to say, it’s something necessary to account for. And three, youth ministry in the ‘burbs is a tricky thing for a lot of reasons but among them is our collective busyness.

Simply having a retreat weekend is tough enough. In fact, one of the reasons we do not do fall retreats is due to the difficulty of creating a critical mass. A week before the retreat, I did not know if we would have 2 students or 20. Further, in order to secure the camp (Sandy Hills, in North East, MD), we needed 50 participants. I want to be clear here and not cast any negativity on our respective youth groups (our churches, our families, etc.) but only to make the point that youth ministry, and in this case, fall retreats are becoming increasingly difficult in the busyness of suburban life.

Back to April – we discussed this on the long ride back from Wheaton, the expectation of our retreat grew. In fact, this helped us develop the problem that we wanted to discuss and its solution – the idols we create and the journey that Christ has called us to. We decided that there were numerous journeys that our lives were on and some times the metaphor of “journey” was not always helpful so we narrowed it down to two – the Inward and the Outward Journey and this became our theme.

Deposits from our ministries were in, youth leaders were committing to the weekend, the brochures were mailed out and we were excited. Then the next week all I felt I heard was, “I can’t make it, I got a recital, game, practice, it’s Homecoming, taking the PSATs, taking the SAT’s, taking the MCATS” (some of these AP programs are getting out of hand ;-) and I thought to myself, “I should have never have listened to Greg Klimokegaard”.

Part 2 Tomorrow.

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