Abide & Grow Mini Retreats August 25, 2025 Rev. Alice Horner Nelson Our upcoming theme for the 2025-2026 program year is Abide & Grow: Cultivating the Fruit of the Spirit. Part of our engagement with this series will be holding four mini retreats. There will be more to come about the retreats but for now, we wanted to make sure you had general information to hold these dates on your calendars. We look forward to sharing more about the whole program year in the coming weeks, and we hope you will join us for as many of the mini retreats as you can. Who: Childcare for Infants - PreK Programing for Children (K-2nd, 3rd-5th) Programming for Youth (6th-12th) Programming for Adults What: Abide & Grow Quarterly Retreats are designed for deeper spiritual engagement with the Fruit of the Spirit—including utilizing all three centers of intelligence: Head, Heart, and Hands. Rather than having one intergenerational retreat over a full weekend, these quarterly mini-retreats will be from 12:00 – 2:30 p.m. on four Sunday afternoons throughout the year: Sept. 28 (Introduction to Theme, Abide & Grow: Cultivating the Fruit of the Spirit): John 15 & Galatians 5 Feb. 8 (Cultivating the Fruit of Love, Peace, Goodness) April 26 (Cultivating the Fruit of Self-Control, Patience, Faithfulness) July 26 (Cultivating the Fruit of Joy, Kindness, Gentleness) Cost: Children & Youth (ages 0-18) Cost Covered by Calvary (no charge) Adults (age 19+) $30 per retreat $100 for all four retreats ($20 savings!) Retreats will include a catered lunch, large group teaching/discussion sessions, and small group breakout sessions in the areas of music, movement, and artistic expression. Register for one - four retreats here! September 28 will be our first retreat and here are the leaders who will help guide us through our time together: Ian Cummins - Bible Study/Intro to theme (large group session) Carol Sullivan - Yoga (Breakout session) Ryan Collins - Singing Bowls (Breakout session) Deanna Geldons - Icon candle creation (Breakout session) There will also be specific rotations for our students. For anyone needing a bit of self-guided contemplative time, there will be a floor labyrinth in the Fireplace Room. This year’s theme is being captured in merch! We have a T-shirt: $11 (s-xxxl); Sweatshirt: $18.25 (s-xxxl); and Tote: $6:25. To ensure we don’t have too many extras, we will be using retreat registration and merch only form to know how many of each item to order. So if you would like any of the items shown below, please use one of the two links above to place that order. The retreat registration link also has merch registration included, but if you can’t make the retreats and want to buy this year’s theme merch you will use the “merch only” link. Tags: faith formation, abide and grow