Author: Canon Dr. Josh R. Ritter
Lifelong Christian Formation’s 2024 Fall Formation Leadership Retreat has just concluded, and we had a wonderful time! Forty participants from around the Episcopal Diocese of Texas joined together at Camp Allen on Nov. 7-9. Formation leadership who attended came from small churches and large churches.
We had part-time and full-time folks, clergy and lay leaders, church planters, missioners, campus missioners, and chaplains. We had a variety of theological perspectives and a diversity of learning styles. It was a wonderful time!
We socialized, we had incredible conversations, we prayed together, we studied scripture together, we strengthened old relationships and made new ones. We ate a lot and laughed a lot, and we explored some deeper dimensions of formation and discipleship.
We learned that Jesus and Paul have much to tell us about the ways our communication is a spiritual practice of seed casting and the ways that nurturing our relationships is also a spiritual practice. We enacted this by practicing a sampling of the Being With curriculum and also a model of community engagement called public deliberation. Overall, we learned a lot about where we are and where we want to go…together.
Our theme this year was the Ecology of Discipleship where we explored our local contexts and regions as eco-systems of inter-connection, inter-relationship, inter-wovenness, and mentorship.
We also found more common ground through our inter-connections with the larger ecology of the diocese and the ways that we can continue enhancing our work together by fostering warmth, nurturing growth, and cultivating thriving relationships within an ecology of Christ’s love, one for another. We are called to do this through a discipleship practice of sincere and genuine conversations about meaning, belonging, and purpose.
What we discovered in our explorations is that a model of ministries and churches as silos of loosely connected affiliations does not work very well as a model of Christian community. We also concluded that we are called to a deeper and more meaningful design as the Body of Christ, and Paul’s poetic vision of the Body of Christ is one of ecologies, eco-systems, and inter-connections through inter-relationships and inter-dependence on God through Christ Jesus.
We are invited to thrive together…because we are each other’s harvest.
None of us, says Paul, can see or understand the full truth of the gospel without everyone else. A foot cannot see the whole picture if it only sees reality (through a glass darkly) from the perspective of a foot – as one individual piece that is disconnected from the bigger story of God.
All in all, then, our retreat was a wonderful time of friendship, fellowship, connection, and collaboration where we came to the realization that we are each part of the Body of Christ, and we are invited into Paul’s beautiful project of improving the relationships among the parts…because we belong to each other.
Formation 