Some background...

Okay, so before I get into the story of my retreat this past weekend, I need to lay some groundwork, starting with some disclaimers.

First of all, this will be a series of posts, much like my reflections from Thailand, though possibly not as long. I will, however, be laying this out over several days, simply because there's way too much for a post of civilized length.

Secondly, the full story goes back across about 6 weeks, and contains a number of moving parts. So, if it seems like there's a bit of jumpiness from one post to the next for a while, it's probably because there is. I promise to bring everything back together in the end, or at least to try really hard to do so!

And now, for some background. For those who don't know, or who do know but forgot, I attend CrossWalk Community, more typically referred to simply as CrossWalk. CrossWalk is a satellite congregation of the Mechanicsburg Brethren in Christ Church (better known as McBIC), which has been my home church for the last decade. What does that mean? Well, we're not totally sure we know either, but here are the particulars. We meet on Sunday evenings in the McBIC building. Our pastor is on the McBIC staff (also has duties with young adult ministry in general). If you become a member at CrossWalk, you're a member of McBIC. However, we do church a bit differently at CrossWalk. Rather than sitting in rows of chairs, we meet around tables. Instead of a sermon where only the pastor speaks and everyone else listens, we have time for discussion around our tables, and often have discussions with the whole group. The service was started with the goal to reach young adults, and also those who aren't comfortable in a traditional church setting.

CrossWalk launched over 3 years ago at the end of September in 2005, and got off to a fast start. For the first year to 18 months, we were averaging about 100 people on a given Sunday night, and seeing lots of spiritual fruit in the way off people coming to Christ and others who had been with Christ but been away coming back and rededicating their lives. It was a very, very exciting time. Then, as the newness started to wear off and our opening round of momentum faded, we started to see attendance dip, but were still seeing a great amount of life change. Not too long after our 2nd anniversary, we really started to struggle in a lot of ways, and 2008 in general was just a very tough year. Attendance really fell off and we just weren't seeing nearly the amount of fruit that we had before, though there were still some great stories.

I was on the original launch team for CrossWalk, and have served on the "core team" for probably 2+ years, though I don't remember exactly when I joined. Since summer 2007, I've been in leadership of that team. What is the core team, you ask? Well, that's a really good question, as it's really been evolving from the get go. The beauty of having a small church underneath a larger church is that we don't have to deal with much in the way of formal structure and governance, so we can be very flexible in trying to figure out what works, and we have been doing that almost from the beginning. However, the best description for the core team would be a church board/deacon board hybrid. It's a group of key lay leaders, along with our pastor, who serve to set direction and provide oversight to CrossWalk. My leadership role on that team, until recently, has mainly been administrative in nature - I would call the meetings, run them, follow up on things we decided, etc.

One of the encouraging things that we saw happening in the midst of some tough times at CrossWalk was a number of gifted leaders migrate towards CrossWalk from the standard McBIC service - including a couple who had been with CrossWalk at launch, but had soon migrated back to McBIC for a variety of reasons. Their return coincided with a stated new emphasis on prayer, as that was something that they were very passionate about and gifted in. He, in particular, took a significant role in encouraging us as a core team, and as a congregation at large, to put a stronger emphasis on really seeking God first, rather than trying to plan and figure our way out of things and then ask God to bless our plans.

One of the immediate results of this was that prayer, which had at first consisted of the standard opening "God bless our meeting" prayer, and then moved to some significant dedicated time at the end of meetings, became the first order of business at our core team meetings, and a place we went back to throughout. As this was going on, I was processing the idea of the Core Team retreat. Our pastor has family connections to a condo in Ocean City, NJ, which means we have a very low cost place to go for a winter getaway. Last January we had gone there, schemed and planned for a weekend, came back with a nifty little program that got everyone excited for a few weeks/months, and then disappeared. As I thought through doing a retreat again, I really felt like we needed to do one, but this time sensing God saying that we should keep the focus on prayer, and on really listening to Him regarding His plans and desires for CrossWalk were.

So, there's how this weekend's retreat was born. Tomorrow, onto some of the runup to the retreat...