3 Comments Nov 30, 2010
Happy Thanksgiving everyone! Hope you all had a good time of giving thanks with friends and family.
Hopefully you made it out to Thanksgiving Retreat. It was a blessed 2 days of sharing and reflections of the past year, for all God has done in our different ministries. It was also a special retreat since we had people from all our different church plants come to join us: Taiwan, UT Austin, Riverside, San Diego and Minnesota! It was great to see Gary, Bob, Will and Isaiah again, along with all the Koinonia staff that went on different church plants.
We had people from each of the different ministry groups come up to share their reflections on the past year. The most memorable sharing for me was Andy’s, when he started off his reflection in Mandarin. Everyone laughed, which either means his Mandarin has gotten better, or it’s still really horrible (I can’t tell). Anyways, it was great to hear from all the different sharings how God was moving on the different campuses. And it was great to see all our brothers and sisters from the different church plants!
In addition to people sharing their reflections, we had different performances by different groups. The seniors came up to sing us a song (it sounded really good!) that I forgot the name of (whoops). Some of the youth kids came up to lead us in a time of praise!
The brothers and sisters from Riverside did a dance that reminded me of TC.
We had an all-Gracepoint orchestra (we had people from Austin, Riverside and San Diego!) play an arrangement of “My Tribute”, composed by Paul. The brothers and sisters from Taiwan sang a song (which I also forgot the name of) in English and in Mandarin.
Finally, in last year’s tradition, all the people from the different church plants came up to sing “Thank You For Giving to the Lord”.
It’s amazing how just over the course of a year, the size of that group singing doubled! Praise God for how he is bringing people to him on the Riverside, San Diego and Minnesota campuses!
We also had Pastor Manny from UT Austin gave a talk about the history of college revivals. If there’s anything I remember from that talk, it’s that so many of those college revivals were started by students! Something for all us college students to ponder.
Thanksgiving Retreat ended with many brothers and sisters making public their salvation decisions! Terry from Kairos (my peer and fellow chemical engineer) made his salvation decision, and so did Eugene, Mike and Anthony (from Koinonia). Praise God for these lives committed to Christ!
That wrapped up Thanksgiving Retreat 2010. Hopefully you were all able to make it! If not, don’t miss the Thanksgiving Retreat next year!
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