The H2O Kent staff team recently noticed how hard it is for many students to describe our Fall Retreat. They are excellent at communicating enthusiasm about the event, after having experienced it for themselves, but they’re not so good at actually providing handles for someone who’s never been to one of our Fall Retreats before. So we started making a more concerted effort to provide tangible details for this annual event, over these past few weeks, and we were encouraged to see more people sign up for their first Fall Retreat. And it proved to be another experience of seeing God do “Fall Retreat” things throughout this weekend.
As pictured above, my Fall Retreat weekend started with driving a minivan full of snack foods and drinks from Kent to Elkhorn Valley in Carroll County. The “Food Team” is not front-and-center in an event like this, but we’ve learned that a late-night can of Dr. Pepper and a plate of Doritos can go a long way towards building community. So I was glad to play a part in setting the stage for a memorable weekend, and I sincerely enjoyed the opportunity to talk with our faithful H2O Intern Aiden on the 90-minute drive to start the weekend. The road trip is also just as much a part of the Fall Retreat as the programming of our sessions.
The sessions are pretty great, too. They have a lot of similarities to the weekly worship gatherings that we do on campus at Kent State University: some worship through music… some teaching from the Bible… some snapshots of what God is doing in the lives of individual members of our community… But it hits different in a special, set-apart location. And we have a guest speaker who brings a different perspective from the people on our team who typically teach from the Bible. The three sessions that we organized are loosely organized around our church’s mission to stimulate spiritual growth Upward, Inward, and Outward.
We also try to leave lots of time for unstructured conversation and recreation. This is where a real sense of community and belonging forms: late at night… early in the afternoon… during meals in the camp dining hall… and during free time on Saturday afternoon.
I always love our Saturday morning session, which we typically hold outdoors and keep shorter than the evening sessions. The natural beauty of the Appalachian foothills enhances the sense of worship. And we use this space to set students up for some individual time seeking God through prayer and reading the Bible.
Some students are understandably intimidated by the idea of 75 minutes of quiet time, but I think we queue things up for them pretty well, and we regularly hear that this slot in the schedule is many people’s favorite part of the weekend.
After the time for individual practice of spiritual disciplines, we have time for Life Groups to reconvene and process the things that they’ve been thinking and feeling and hearing from God up to that point in the retreat. We talk together, we pray together, and then we get lunch together. It’s really not all that mystical, but it still feels kind of magical how God works through these times.
After lunch, we did our “H2Olympics,” which are super-silly and super-campy. But again, they are surprisingly effective at getting people to come out from under their shells and work together to have fun and compete for a meaningless trophy. One of the teams from the North Campus Life Group that I coach won the H2Olympics this year (note that I still care enough to mention this), but everybody won new relationships that paved the way for deeper community to be developed through the subsequent free time and evening meal.
After dinner, we got to celebrate seven people getting baptized, and then we finished with our last session before heading home. It was a pretty great weekend, even though it was also exhausting. I eagerly anticipate the release of the professional photographer’s images from our church’s Fall Retreat (and will probably share some of my favorites from that collection when they’re made available, as well). But in the meantime, I like reflecting and sharing some of my favorite photos from Fall Retreat.
