Amazing God….
The diocese of Albany has a new initiative- Amazing God. Three years, divided by the Trinity. I think it is a very encouraging and interesting initiative.
While wondering this week how this might impact some of our programming, I receive an email asking us to do a staff retreat on Amazing God and implementing that initiative in the parish. I am not sure if ‘retreat’ and ’staff implimentation’ really go together, so I am praying about how we would give a staff reflection time AND in-service time. It has brought me to reflect on past adult programming we have done.
Having attempted ’staff retreat’ in school ministry, I find it a challenge. It is not really a challenge in presenting, it is more a challenge of participant mindset. In school ministry, the teachers’ mindset was very resistant for the most part. Their minds were everywhere but on retreat- papers to grade, classes to plan, programs to learn about. Often they would come to the retreat with their plan books and grade books. That is not a mindset easy to shift into prayerful reflection. I even attempted to write a retreat based on using their plan-books. If you cannot stop them from bringing them, then show them how to pray with them. I think it went pretty well. So, I think the challenge for this parish, to both be renewed and have some ideas to renew their parish with Amazing God will have to have a similar bent. They are coming with their ‘plan book’ and ‘to do list’ how do we pray our way through that so we don’t lose sight of our Amazing God when we are in the weeds?
Prayers as we develop this further would be greatly appreciated.