Karen Murphy- Leadership Team Member and Training Coordinator-Gainesville GA
Grace Episcopal Church COHI recently held a day-long retreat at The Wings Retreat Center. Their COHI group had four new folks who had just completed training via Zoom through the S.E. Regional COHI training COHORT. They did their practice visits, had a period of discernment, and were ready to join the Grace COHI Center.
The Leadership Team planned the following:
Gather and Mingle (we all wore our name badges-badges as new folks had been ordered in advance).
Opening Worship was contemplative with prayers, reflections, readings, and a period of silent meditation after each one.
The group studied the Rule for the day using the 4 A’s method of getting into the text: What Assumptions do you think St. Benedict made? What do you Agree with? What do you want to Argue about? What do you Aspire to act on?
We spent some time going around to “tell our stories” using jumping-off points to help keep it brief:
What is your name?
How did you come to Grace?
What brought you to COHI?
What does community mean to you?
Keeping this activity “brief” wound up taking a nice chunk of time. (Upon reflection- we all need more time to share our stories!)
Since this is COHI’s 30th-year celebration, we watched the 19 min. video of COHI History by Helen Appelberg.
Our priest Rev. Dr. Stuart Higginbotham was our guest speaker on community. He led us through a discussion on community and offered two ways to think about community: a Venn Diagram which separates some groups into the “them and us” or an image of nesting dolls using the concentric rings model where we all can accept each other as humans.
Wildflower seed packets were distributed with a little reading about wildflowers growing in community.
One of our members had ordered and picked up lunch for us and folks gathered as they wanted to outside or inside in small groups.
Since we have four new members, we began some discussion about our Grace COHI Norms for this year.
We closed with more contemplative prayers, taking a brief time to meditate after each one. We used The COHI Prayer, Blessing of the Hands, washing of hands, and a Survival Kit which is a baggy with scripture readings, a pencil to write your blessings each day, a pack of gum to stick to it when the going gets hard, or a rubber band to be flexible, etc.
We have signed our covenants and will recommission on Sunday, Sept. 8, in front of the congregation.