"The Character Of A Leader" - Pastor's Retreat Theme

What can we say? The Lord blessed in more ways than we even know about...in our view, the Pastor's Retreat was a royal success! All the pastors showed up that were invited (we only have seven churches in our Conference here that have pastors/lay leaders...the rest of the churches simply have different folks in charge of finding speakers, etc.) We were a group of seven pastor couples and Sandy and I...it was a great size group for some amazing intimate times of sharing and praying and so on.

(The group of pastors all together...)

It was a real joy to hand out gift bags as everyone arrived and then our ice-breaker games to start the weekend seemed to go over very well and definitely "broke the ice." The Saturday evening session was very good...lots of good interaction. And the concert that night was a highlight for everyone...especially because they all seemed to have met the singer before and knew most of her songs.

(The beautiful hostess...)

(Enjoying some ice-breaker games...)

Late Saturday evening we noticed that another group that was scheduled to be using the Business Meeting Room, had not shown up. On Sunday morning we confirmed that we could use the room instead of just sitting in the "Continental Breakfast" area of the lobby...this was a huge answer to prayer as we now had better privacy and, together with Sandy's simple yet special touch of decorations, the room was ours to enjoy.

Sunday morning we had a "workshop" time, which included tons of sharing, interaction, discussion and fellowship. After a short break, we gave away more resources and then had a time of worship before I shared some thoughts about the Spiritual Battle that we all face, especially them as pastors.

(One of our group sessions...)

After our session we spent a bunch of time sharing and praying for each other. After that Sandy and I led the group in celebrating the Lord's Supper. We finished off the weekend with about 4 couples staying to do some bowling...some never having done it before...and Sandy got the highest score...she was most pumped that she beat me!!!

(Aldo getting ready to throw a strike...)

(Sandy and Josefina enjoying the bowling game...)

We feel so blessed to have been part of this experience and we heard numerous comments about how they hoped this would not be the first and last retreat but that they could do this annually as well as work harder on staying connected throughout the year (they all get together four times a year for business meetings...a suggestion was made to incorporate more time before or after those meetings for prayer and sharing). Sandy and I tried (I think successfully) to simply be in the background and let them all interact with each other - we hope they will be motivated to keep going with this...many mentioned feeling lonely in their work!

Thank you for your prayers for this event...God answered! We are also so thankful that our children had a great weekend over at Don & Minna Thiessen's home (thank you guys sooooo much for helping us out!!!!).

We have less then three weeks left and the schedule is packed with work, programs and lots of visiting before we say our tearful goodbyes!

Gerald