NYC MAY 2022 RETREAT

Gathering & Invitation / Personal Retreat / Tangible Next Steps

On Monday we will arrive from all over the country and begin a shared journey. We’ll meet each other, worship together, orient ourselves to the retreat, and begin to exhale and slow down. Drew Jackson will help us “Embrace the Mystery” and Rev Stephanie will invite us into “The Church Cracked Open”. We’ll end with Night Prayer and the opportunity for a great night of sleep.

Tuesday morning will be a 3 hour, guided personal retreat. Through spiritual practices, simple liturgies, and embodied prayer, we will be led into holy space in which God can do what only God can do. This will propel us into an afternoon of solitude, either on campus or in the neighborhood of Chelsea, and then back together for an ecumenical, practice-based Eucharist service. And then by 4:30pm or so, we’ll be released into the beauty and energy and art of NYC. Eat great food…explore a museum…walk Central Park…see a Broadway show…and soak up the goodness of the city. (FYI, our hospitality team will help with ideas, plans, directions, and anything else you might need)

Finally, Wednesday morning will focus on heading back into our actual home communities. How can we translate the practices and rhythms of the retreat into our real lives and churches? What are tools and resources that can support this good work? How can we become menders of the church cracked open? We’ll end the whole retreat with a time of prayer and sending.

Or said more simply: the three movements of the retreat are (1) Opening to the rhythms of Grace, (2) Swimming deep in the rhythms of Grace, and (3) Learning tools to invite others into the rhythms of Grace.

“My fervent prayer is that you will examine your life and the life of your church, and the systems and assumptions that shape both. I hope you will become less anxious about how you and your community are cracking open, and more curious about how God might remake you as a true community of love.”

— Rev. Stephanie Spellers

Our Guides….

The Rev. Canon Dr Stephanie Spellers is one of the Episcopal Church’s leading thinkers and consultants around 21st century ministry and mission and is Canon to the Presiding Bishop for Evangelism and Reconciliation.

The author of The Church Cracked Open, a foundational resource for our retreat, she serves as Canon to the Presiding Bishop for Evangelism and Reconciliation. Spellers is responsible for supporting the ministry of the Presiding Bishop and Primate of The Episcopal Church as it pertains to evangelism and reconciliation efforts at the local, congregational, diocesan, and churchwide levels.

If you want to get to know Rev Stephanie a little more, listen to her wonderful interview about Ecumenism on The Eternal Current Podcast.

Shauna Niequist is the best-selling author of Cold Tangerines, Bittersweet, Bread & Wine, Savor, and Present Over Perfect. She is married to Aaron, and they live in NYC with their sons, Henry & Mac. Shauna is a bookworm, a beachbum, and a passionate gatherer of people, especially around the table.

Aaron Niequist is a liturgist, writer, and pastor, recently graduated from General Theological Seminary in NYC. After leading worship at Mars Hill Church (Grand Rapids, MI) and Willow Creek Church (Barrington, IL), he created A New Liturgy - a collection of modern liturgical worship recordings. He then curated a discipleship-focused, formational, ecumenical, practice-based community called “The Practice”. Aaron released a book called The Eternal Current: How a Practice-based Faith can Save us from Drowning, and continues to create resources to help others flesh it out. But that’s just job stuff. The best part of his life is his wife Shauna, and their sons Henry and Mac.

**The Rev. Christine Lee** is the Priest-in-Charge of St. Peter’s Chelsea, a 190-year old church birthing something new. She came to St. Peter’s to lead an experiment in revitalization, part of the Episcopal Diocese of New York’s larger vision for church renewal. She is a Doctor of Ministry student at Fuller Theological Seminary, focused on leading change and cultivating environments where non-traditional leaders can flourish. Her dream is to one day open a brewery-monastic community-church with her husband Jimmy and their puppy Baxter.

Drew Jackson is the pastor of Hope East Village, which exists to bear witness to the Kingdom of God Born in Williamstown, NJ, Drew studied Political Science at the University of Chicago, and went on to gain his M.A. in Theology from Fuller Theological Seminary. Drew is also the Co-Founder and President of Made for Pax, a non-profit organization that seeks to inspire and equip the next generation through slow, beautiful, Jesus-centered content created by people of color. Drew’s debut poetry collection, God Speaks Through Wombs, was published in September 2021, and his next collection is set to release in the fall of 2022. Drew is deeply committed to seeing the contemplative life, and the work of prophetic justice and peacemaking embodied in his own life and in the life of the church. He is blessed to share life with his wife Genay, and their twin daughters, Zora and Suhaila.

**And nearly a dozen more!** It truly takes a village…and we are thrilled to be joined by spiritual directors, musicians, authors, pastors, liturgists, and artists who want to help create holy space for every attender. Cannot wait for you to meet them all.

Location

The General Theological Seminary is located in the Chelsea neighborhood of New York City, on the west side of Manhattan, occupying the full city block between West 20th and West 21st Streets and between Ninth and Tenth Avenues. The entrance is on 21st Street halfway between Ninth and Tenth Avenues.

The General Theological Seminary 440 W 21st St New York, NY 10011 212-243-5150

Get to know our gracious host…

General theological seminary:

Educating and forming lay and ordained leaders for the church in a changing world.

This mission statement was adopted in 1999 and reaffirmed in 2015. As we live out this mission, we seek to be and to become a community for whom ongoing and deepening conversion to new life in Christ is a constant goal. Our purpose is to invite and call others to that life of conversion by our own understanding of the Christian faith — biblical, historical and theological — and our ability to reflect on that faith.

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