I had the most wonderful weekend this weekend, as I am calling this in; I am driving home from the airport on a rainy Saturday night, and looking forward to being with my kids. But also thinking about what a fun and slightly unusual weekend I just had with the ladies of Heritage United Methodist Church in Hattiesburg.
The reason that this is unusual is that Paula, the Pastor’s wife, who also runs the Women’s Ministry events told me that their goal and their purpose for their Women’s Ministry events is to purposefully go deeper and dig deeper into the issues while at the same time to have retreats that are just fun times to get women together to fellowship, socialize and teach. At the same time it’s important to really make an effort to be proactive to ensure that the women walk away with a very good idea of how to apply this teaching to their life. Paula wanted to ensure that any necessary equipping took place to give the know-how and inspire these ladies to apply what they learned so that it isn’t just head-knowledge.
It’s interesting that as a result the tension becomes either trading off the in-depths and the lengths of times that these retreats are scheduled for or trading off the number of people that you want to come. Paula was actually delightful and she was so concerned that I would be worried that there were only 85 women registered for this event. But I looked at her schedule and it was so in-depth — there was a Friday night session where I taught on understanding men and then there was a half-hour discussion time around their tables, and then the next morning another teaching session, an hour long group discussion time, and then another teaching session and a question-and-answer session, and another hour-long discussion time where the whole point is to take every piece that they learned and talk about how they were going to apply that individual piece to their life and then move on, talk about the next piece, and how they were going to apply that to their life and so on.
That means that a women’s retreat will have to be a Friday night and basically all day Saturday; and increasingly that is not the way that churches choose to do women’s retreats. Increasingly, there are so many wonderful retreat options out there that churches are electing to do a 9 to 12 on a Saturday morning. Do one teaching session, a second teaching session, and then a third session, maybe a question-and-answer and boom, done by lunch. That’s wonderful too and those tend to attract bigger crowds. But it does miss the intense focus on discussion and applications and I realized we often have had such a concern when the retreats which we have spent so much time working on don’t have the huge numbers of people. Even though I personally think a retreat of 85 women at a church of 600 adults is actually a big number as a very committed turnout.
What makes us think that we should be constantly going for numbers at a depth?
I don’t have any answer to that. I just noticed that trend, and in many ways it’s fine; you get more women involved if you make it more practical and more able for them to not have to be away from the kids for a whole day, for example. But you trade off in the intensity and the depth.
So I have no answers, it’s just something I have observed and I deeply appreciate Paula and the in-depth work that she put into this, and these wonderful ladies that were so willing to go into detail about how they were going to apply it to their lives. So even though this was a small crowd, it was a treat.