Skiing? Retreating?

Skiing?

Retreating?

What happens when you put these two together?  You get a Ski Retreat!

Over this reading week (Feb. 9-14) we decided to run our own SFU specific Ski Retreat to Manning Park.

The vision for this is that it would be classified as one of your outreach events to invite our friends who don't necessarily follow Jesus.  In the past Ski Retreats, it has been a place where when students left they Ski Retreat, they would also leave their baggage about Christians behind.  It was a place to build trust and deeper friendships with our friends.

One of our previous students Garry has a story about Ski Retreat.

Me and Garry after his Baptism at Mark West Pacific

In my second year of university, I was invited to a bible study at school. Little did I know what I was getting myself into. Justin was the most welcoming person I have ever met and he has taught me a lot through these studies. Come February, Justin invited me to the annual ski retreat in Hope. It was one of the greatest experiences I've had to say the least; the weather was great, the people were great, and the church was great! That first year at the ski retreat I was going through some troubles in my life. It maybe because we were staying at a church, but it was the first time I really prayed about something in my life. At first, I thought God didn't hear me, but several weeks later, He did. A year later, staying at another church, I was reminded about the prayer from the previous year, and I thought, "wow, God has done some amazing things in my life." This is when I really began to count the blessings in my life and started to believe that God loves me.

This year, it felt a bit different.  Although we had the same vision as previous years, the number of "Non-Christians" from our community was lacking.  As Barron and I have been working at SFU for over 3 years now, we notice specifically that this year was VERY different with the number of Christian first year involvement in our community.  We have a lot of young Christians and the values of Justice, Righteousness, and Invitation that IVCF SFU is so well known for has not penetrated into the hearts of our newcomers.  That being said, I wouldn't call the Ski Retreat a complete "miss" but it served another purpose.

The majority of our Emerging Leaders Team were actually at the Ski Retreat and from that shared experience, we noticed a deeper sense of friendship and community being formed amongst our Emerging Leaders and overall community.  Ski Retreat may have been a miss in having Non-Christians there but it was a win in the step towards that overarching vision for our community on campus.