Retreat

We're taking the young singles on a retreat this weekend. We retreat a lot at McKinney. I think it's important for us to get away, connect with each other, and take a deep breath. So, our ministries retreat, our staff team retreats, our leadership teams retreat, and we retreat as individuals.

Lots of churches use retreats for pretty intense teaching teams. I'm not opposed to that, but for most of our retreats I take a different approach. Since we're at a church that places an extremely high value on teaching, we don't have to get away to do that. We also don't use retreats to do intense planning very frequently. It just seems silly to me for us to pay a ton of money to go someplace pretty nice, and then hole up in a conference room to plan while we've got a perfectly good conference room back here at the church. I may change my mind on that in the future, but that's where I'm at today.

We use the majority of our retreats for rest, relaxation, prayer, and community. This weekend, I'll teach two brief sessions titled "Teach us to pray..." but they'll be short and followed by some time to get away and pray. The rest of our time will be completely unstructured. We want it to be as laid back as possible, and a time for people to spend time investing in relationships they wouldn't have made margin for in Fort Worth.

Looking forward to a great time.