September Staff Retreat - Inspiration & Renewal

The staff members of Lancaster First UMC participated in a two day overnight retreat at the georgeous (more about the spelling of this word later in this article) Camp Atika, about a twenty minute drive southeast of Lancaster, Ohio.

Nestled in the scenic hills and wooded area of nearby Hocking Hills, this location provided us with lots of inspiration and renewal as we gathered to renew our faith in Jesus Christ and plan ministry for the coming year.

Here are some of the highlights of our time together:

• Our agenda included worship services, Holy Communion, singing, hiking, free time, eating, laughing, getting better acquainted, and board games.
• We spent a lot of time sharing our personality profiles based on myers-briggs, enjoyed learning how we are created uniquely by God, and thought about how we might best function as a team based on our personality types and preferred work environments
• Drawing from our Wesleyan and United Methodist heritage, we developed a staff covenant which will help us to function at a high level as a staff team.
• We focused on our primary mission as a church which is to make disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world and our core values which include 1) radical hospitality 2) passionate worship 3) intentional faith development 4) risk-taking mission 5) extravagant generosity.
• Part of our bible study time was to read Acts 2:42-47 together which includes references to the core values and we discussed the six benchmarks to become an Acts 2 fruit bearing congregation. These benchmarks include 1) increase in membership 2) increase in worship attendance 3) baptisms 4) including new Christians into our church membership 5) seeing an increase of people involved in intentional disciple making small groups 6) paying 100% of our conference apportionments.
• We spent some time thinking about how we might break the 80/20 barrier (20% of the people doing 80% of the ministries) and how we can increase our level of stewardship commitment within the church, especially in the context of our national economic downturn.
• What would an overnight staff retreat be without a fun game of "Apples to Apples" and a two hour competitive round of "Trivial Pursuit?" My team lost, partly because I asked the question at one point, "Is the earth considered one of our planets?"
• We conducted a SWOT analysis of our congregation (S - Strengths, W - Weaknesses, O - Opportunities, T - Threats) and listed our responses on a giant white board which led to a very helpful discussion. From this exercise we developed some key areas that we as a staff will work together to address in helping us in our mission of making disciples for the transformation of the world. These include 1) increasing the number of lay people involved in at least one ministry. 2) focusing on how we can continue to maximize the use of our beautiful Crossroads facility as we seek to live out our mission 3) find ways to help our church pay 100% of our conference apportionments 4) increase and expand the number of discipleship making small groups/classes.
• Since Camp Akita has a beautiful lake, several of us enjoyed boat rides with one staff member (who shall remain nameless) capsizing his boat (did I use a male pronoun?)

OK, now the explanation for the word, "georgeous." I told the staff during the beginning of the retreat that I had misspelled the word, "gorgeous" during one of our Wednesday evening worship services and instead spelled it as "georgeous." So now, we have a new word to describe something as magnificent and wonderful. And that word is "georgeous."

So as you can see in our staff picture above, we had a georgeous retreat together these past few days! The staff would like to thank the congregation for giving us the gift of these two days which inspired and renewed us so that we can offer our very best in ministry.

We are excited about what God is going to do through us for the remainder of 2009 and into the new year.