Just Home from "Preacher Camp"...

For seven years I've been meeting, annually, with five other pastors for a week of self-designed study leave. Being in similar kinds of Baptist churches, and all preaching from the lectionary, the format of our annual study/retreat is a preview of the coming year's lectionary texts. (If you're unfamiliar, the Revised Common Lectionary divides the Bible, for preaching/worship purposes, into a three-year cycle, presenting an Old Testament, Psalm, Gospel, and Epistle reading for each week.) We take the coming year, divide it into six seasons, and prepare a preview of that season's texts, along with theme ideas, suggestions for preaching, and brainstorms about other worship elements. It's been a wonderful way to prepare for a year -- and great just to be together for the fellowship. And, if you can imagine a minister's retreat that begins with "Margarita Monday," it might not sound quite so boring! (Don't worry, Mom... we're all still Baptists!)

At our last gathering someone suggested that we should bring our families next time. We've grown quite close, and share not only in these annual retreats, but through Facebook and email we stay in touch throughout the year. These are colleagues as colleagues should be. Our sessions usually begin by "checking in" -- providing a safe, understanding group of ears to hear our joys and sorrows, our trials and successes in ministry. Someone generally breaks out a box of Kleenex. There's lots of laughter as we walk through the liturgical year together. (You just can't imagine how funny preparing for Pentecost really can be!) And the food and fellowship are, generally speaking, spectacular. We are two women and four men, serving churches from Baltimore, MD to Waco, TX, and scattered all in between, and the only thing that could possibly have made the last six years any better... was bringing our families along for the ride.

So... thanks to the generosity of a PRBC family with a fabulous house on a nearby mountain lake, seventeen of us gathered for this edition of "homipalooza, family style." (Homiletics is the study of preaching, and a "lolipalooza" is a hum-dinger of any variety!) And you can see from the picture that in addition to coming home with a year's worth of preaching/worship ideas, we also had time for more than a little family fun. There were the evening dance parties (fantastic to see such esteemed Reverends "bustin' a move" with the teenagers and kids among the group!)... the campfire sing-along, complete with s'mores... the conversations in the hot tub... plenty of water time for swimming and floating... and even enough time for the Dean boys to work on their Cypress Gardens Act.

I'm grateful to Don and Dorisanne, John and Jim and Amy (not my Amy... she's not been privy to such wonderful company until this year), for their creativity, their passion, their scholarship, their deep Christian convictions, but most of all for their frienship, which I treasure. And what a special joy to know that my family now knows how wonderful you are, too.

Preacher Camp? You betcha... can't wait 'till next time!

Russ