Shoe String Budget Team Retreat

Your team is missing out if you don't spend time together outside of your normal ministry time.

This past weekend we had a youth ministry team retreat. (More details below)
Our youth ministry team is totally volunteer. We have 10 fantastic adults who love students.

Here are elements of our retreat:
Encouragement - Your team serves each week together pouring into the lives of students. Sometimes it is easy to get down or even start to struggle. A retreat gives you opportunity to encourage each other.

Challenged - It's great to be challenged to grow spiritually and challenged to serve students better.

Refreshing - We all get drained spiritually from time to time. A retreat is a great time to find refreshment.

Training - We always need to look for ways to improve and learn some new skills or approaches in youth ministry.

Strength - A team that hangs out together stays together. There is strength and depth added to the team when the team hangs out together outside of the normal ministry time.

Our retreat looked like this:
Friday night:
Dinner - We ate pizza and salad together.
Following dinner we watched a video by Andy Stanley about momentum.
We followed the video with a great discussion and analyzing time.
Saturday:
We cooked and ate breakfast together. It was very good.
We took a "walk thru" the book Refuel, by Doug Fields. All about refueling spiritually. This was our Connect with God time encouraging spiritual refreshment.
Lunch
In the afternoon we talked about being a great small group leader. We came up with expectations of our students and expectations of the leaders.
We also watched some TV and various team members fell asleep at various times.
Dinner - we cooked fajitas! Bueno.
We ended the retreat talking about Connecting with Students and evaluating the balance in our youth ministry and also evaluating where each student is at in their spiritual/faith journey.

All the curriculum we used was free or already in our church's possession. We stayed at a donated vacation rental. The only thing we spent money on was our food and some supplies.

When does your youth ministry team get together for training?