You CAN Pull Off Your Own Summer Retreat For Your Group...

I've been getting some really interesting results from my poll I set up on PollDaddy.com (cool service BTW).

The poll is on this question... "What is your answer regarding summer retreats."

One of the answers that people have chosen is this one: "I have never put one on because I wasn't sure I could pull it off."

I thought I'd take a second and address it here....

First of all, I know that you can pull it off because Ben and I were able to. We weren't super-human youth pastors with "super retreat powers". We hadn't ever done one before.

In fact, I'll be honest with you. I hadn't even gone on any youth retreats myself at that point! :)

If we could do it, then I know you can.

Some things you need to consider in order to pull it off are:

• A location
  
• Other adult leaders who will go on the retreat with you to help connect with the students and help you lead/run things
  
• A worship leader and or team
  
• You'll need transportation - there and back. We car pooled in the early days and later rented 15 passenger vans.
  
• A plan. You need to know what you want to accomplish and how you want to do that. We wanted to help our students grow closer to each other (which is why we were doing our own retreat). We also wanted our students to grow closer to God. We designed large worship events and personal devotional times to accomplish this.
  
• You need a speaker. We always just did this ourselves. It gave us a chance to talk about things in an extended setting that we couldn't talk about during our regular youth nights. You can be the speaker or you can bring someone with you to speak (Paid or volunteer).
  
  Those are the things to start thinking about now if you want to be able to pull off your own summer retreat this year.
  
  But one thing you need BEFORE all of that is buy-in from 3 groups of people. I'll be blogging about that at the special "Instant Summer Retreat" blog that I set up.
  
  You can get access to the blog by signing up for it here.
  You'll be able to read that post there when I post it later - hopefully today.
  
  By the way...
  The reason we're putting on this paid "Instant Summer Retreat" teleconference in late April is to teach you everything we learned doing them for over 10 years.
  
  We're also going to give you the exact schedule we used every year, menus, games, sermons you can use, etc. Everything thing we can think of to make it as "instant" as possible. You just need to add the students, leaders, supplies, and location! :)
  
  P.S. If you haven't taken the poll yet, then you can do it here. (The poll will be active until 4/7.)