Description: This overnight weekend retreat focuses on service to others in light of our Baptismal call. It invites participants to pray and reflect on the ideas of call, service, and mission, not only in direct service opportunities but to their experience within their faith community.
Get Ready
- Prep Time: The event must be planned several weeks or months in advance to secure retreat facilities and organize a service opportunity for the second day. Otherwise, preparation requires a few hours in advance to arrange meals, publicize the event, and prepare scripture handouts, reflection journals, and one-on-one discussion materials. On the first day, a couple hours are required to set up prayer space, space for meals, and space to gather in a large circle (chairs, etc.) It may also be necessary to make arrangements for priests if you’d like to include Confession or Mass.
- Volunteers Needed: This retreat can be facilitated by one person or divided among several facilitators. It’s good to have volunteers to drive (carpooling is good!) both to the retreat location and the service site.
- Ideal Group Size: 5-12
- Ideal Time for this Event: Friday evening through Saturday evening or Saturday to Sunday.
- Who is this for? This event works well with a group that already has some familiarity with one another, but can also be beneficial for others, so long as time is provided to get to know one another and build trust.
- Supplies Needed: Marketing materials, pens, Bibles, journals, candles, a crucifix and other prayer space items (if your retreat space doesn’t have a chapel), prayer resources for personal prayer time. You may wish to have recorded music, if you don’t have musicians for prayer. Depending on what your retreat space provides, you may also need to have participants bring linens, sleeping bags/air mattresses, and plan for meals. Your service opportunity may also require additional supplies.
- Reserve the Space: You will need a retreat space that fosters prayer, peace, and quiet, but also has adequate space to gather as a group. A chapel where the Eucharist is reserved is the best place for some of the prayer portions, as well as the break out time for personal prayer. If you include volunteer service in this retreat, you will need a site that is a reasonable distance from your retreat space.
- Publicize the Program: While this program might work best with a small community that has already been formed, it may be a good way to begin forming small communities motivated to serve the parish as a whole. The retreat could then be marketed as a door into becoming more involved in the parish or with local service organizations. Be sure to invite individuals who may be interested in getting more involved or who have been involved with service at various levels.
Prayer for Program Planner: Lord Jesus, you are the source of all light and truth who calls us by our Baptism to know, love, and serve you. Grant me the wisdom to respond to this call myself, and to lead and guide these days of reflection for the glory of Your Kingdom. In Your name we pray, Amen.
Community Building: This retreat weekend has built-in opportunities for social or get-to-know-you activities (see Schedule). These are not provided in this outline, as these activities will vary according to the community you are working with. These opportunities, however, are secondary to the meals and the service project that are incorporated in the retreat. Community will form around mealtime discussion and organic reflection on these experiences, as well as through working intensely together on the service project. The facilitator should be attentive to all conversation over the course of the retreat, directing young adults when possible into more intentional conversation.
Make It Happen
- Meet with your leadership team (if you have one) or other young adults to schedule the event, secure a location, determine a service opportunity, assign tasks for prayer, and make arrangements for transportation and meals.
- Promote your event and get registrations in advance. (It’s important that participants confirm their participation, due to the service site and retreat space.)
- On the first day of the event, arrive at the retreat space, set up spaces, go over the schedule, and let people get settled in. Be sure to do introductions at this time.
- Dinner: Either prepare it together or simply enjoy it if it’s prepared by your retreat center. Be sure to use this time to get to know one another.
- Evening Prayer: focusing on our Baptismal call. (See Recommends section)
- Social/Community Building Time: Be intentional about getting people to talk and get to know one another. Board games such as “Apples to Apples” or “Catch Phrase” are good for this.
- See the Recommends section for Saturday schedule and prayer time suggestions. Be sure when planning, you allow enough time for transportation to and from the service location. Also, provide some time for people to shower and relax after the service time, if appropriate.
Ideas
- You can schedule this event as a follow-up to another service event. If you’re not including volunteer service as part of the schedule, consider moving the afternoon reflection to the morning and providing an opportunity for Mass or Confession in the afternoon. Or incorporate morning Mass.
- Use this program as a planning retreat for your leadership team. Rather than doing direct service, use that time to provide service for your young adult ministry by planning for the next few events or months.
- This retreat and its reflections could also be used as a more extended program, broken up into multiple nights. Here it would be possible to include a volunteer service project, if that was the desired focus, or continue this discussion and reflection into an assessment of current ministries or an individual’s personal ministry within the parish.
Help
- From Maintenance to Mission by Robert S. Rivers, (New York: Paulist Press, 2005). Essays that explore practical ways of implementing the US Bishops’ document “Go and Make Disciples: A National Plan and Strategy for Catholic Evangelization in the United States.”
- “How God Invites Us to Grow,” an article from Catholic Update about the six stages of faith development.
- Catholic Prayer Traditions for the Catechist from the Diocese of Joliet
Recommends: See sample Mission of Baptism Retreat Schedule and Prayer Services and make them your own.
