Comments on: Day 9 – Your Retreat Planning Team

By: Cyndee Ownbey

Cyndee Ownbey — Mon, 02 Nov 2015 00:10:32 +0000

In reply to Teresa. Yes! Kim - let me know if I can connect the two of you! Thank you Teresa!!

By: Teresa

Teresa — Sun, 01 Nov 2015 00:07:29 +0000

We are having a planning meeting Tuesday. Our ladies conference/event is January 23rd. Love to reach out to Kim. We have a fantastic ladies committee and yes, we are a small church. Last year we had 110 ladies attend from all over. My sister flew in from Nashville. We have found a January event draws the most women. And, we only have a one day conference. It is two sessions and we bring in a speaker. We have our lunch catered. It has worked beautifully. Kim, I don’t know where you live but I have some great speakers I could recommend to you. Cyndee could give you my email address.

By: Cyndee Ownbey

Cyndee Ownbey — Sat, 17 Oct 2015 18:24:03 +0000

In reply to Kim. Kim, thank you for your feedback! It is MUCH appreciated! :) I would love to hear how your retreat goes!

By: Kim

Kim — Fri, 16 Oct 2015 14:12:35 +0000

Thank you for your suggestions Cyndee! I am sure that we will be able to use several of these suggestions for our retreat team. Great series that you are providing for us. Thank you for all the information you are sharing, it is much appreciated

By: Cyndee Ownbey

Cyndee Ownbey — Fri, 09 Oct 2015 21:10:29 +0000

In reply to Kim.

Kim, Oh how I understand where you’re coming from! We attend a small church too. Our team has actually decided not to do a retreat next year because it is so much work and wears our core team of ladies out!

Anything you can do to lessen the load will be helpful. Can you cater in some of the food? Maybe order box lunches from someplace nearby? Let them eat lunch or dinner out as part of their free time.

Maybe you could find an inexpensive speaker to come lead all of your sessions, instead of leading sessions or workshops yourselves.

Take a good hard look at your list and see if there’s anything you could do without. You don’t have to have a prayer room. You don’t have to research or lead free time activities.

Maybe your small groups could be fluid and not have official leaders. We were supposed to have small group leaders, but our room set-up was different than we expected. Women naturally stepped up in each group. It wasn’t as big of a deal as I thought it would be.

If you do a 2 night retreat, maybe you could try a 1 night retreat?

Do any of those ideas seem like possibilities?

By: Kim

Kim — Fri, 09 Oct 2015 15:59:04 +0000

Great series on Retreat Planning. A definite help for our women’s group for future retreats.
How can we help the planning team to better enjoy the actual retreat weekend? We are a small group, so the planning members have multiple jobs during the retreat and the actual retreat is a lot of work. The attendees leave feeling spiritually refreshed and connected to one another, but the team leaves feeling “whew, that is over!” I know the leaders have a good time connecting, lots of laughter, but working behind the scenes setting up food, workshops, leading small groups, etc. can leave them feeling more drained than refreshed. Are there any suggestions on helping them? I know there is a great satisfaction and blessing from serving the Lord – but as a small church we only have one retreat each year and I would like to have the team leaders refreshed from the weekend also. Thank you