Renew, Revive, Refresh
Each retreat pursues three basic goals:
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Allow each participant to safely unburden the hurts and pressures of life and ministry in a safe, non-judgmental, and loving environment.
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Assist each person to understand herself/himself more completely.
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To encourage the participants to develop new levels of self-acceptance as well as more effective relational skills. This often includes evaluation of expectations, reordering of priorities, improving communication skills and bringing a new prospective concerning their life and ministry.
Why People Come to Shepherd's Canyon Retreats
People come to Shepherd’s Canyon Retreat with complaints of overwhelming personal, marital, and congregational conflicts, ministry burnout, depression, marital discord, infidelity, and struggles with addictive behavior. As is common for us all, when we are in physical or emotional pain, we attempt to remove ourselves from it as quickly as possible.
At Shepherd’s Canyon Retreat, while we strive to help people alleviate their suffering, we also strongly encourage them to both describe their agony and, even more importantly, to learn from it.
A useful scriptural passage regarding this difficult issue is Romans 5:3-5: “…we also rejoice in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope. And hope does not disappoint us, because God has poured out his love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, whom he has given us.” This scripture makes it clear: suffering, while not to be sought after, is, nevertheless, purposeful and has the enormous potential to deepen our relationship with God and with each other. This is at the heart of what occurs at Shepherd’s Canyon Retreat.
For clients who are married, we strongly suggest spousal participation. We also ask that pariticipants be in a place of readiness for the tough work of self-disclosure and self-awareness. To further enhance the experience we ask that clients totally suspend their ministry responsibilities (including sermon or teaching preparations) for the duration of their session.