What’s Is It?

The Village Gathering is a family retreat, kingdom life training, and worship music gathering and you are invited! Whether you lead a worship team, a student ministry, a local fellowship, or are just a worshiping heart, we are inviting you and your tribe to come and spend these days with us for an amazing retreat time, worshiping and making new friends! Many of the Worship Circle artists you love will be on hand to meet and greet. They will also be performing every night together in multi-stage, multi-arts, worship concerts and you can even bring your instruments and join in!

Gathering as a Gift

I think gathering people together is a true spiritual work and it is a gift to those who receive it. In my life I have sometimes joined with others based on a project, an affiliation, a doctrine, or a work of some kind. Though these connections are perfectly fine they do not reflect what I consider a higher level of coming together. There is a kind of gathering that, at its foundations, is based solely on a love for one another. It is a reflection of a genuine respect for one another and an assignment of value on just being near others that are of a high caliber. I really believe that when great people come together that magic things happen without any further additions to the mix like teachings, or meetings, or training stuff. More importantly, I also believe that if people can come together and assure one another that their gathering is not primarily the result of a project, doctrine, work, etc. and that the attraction is heartfelt and personal–then the magical affect is multiplied exponentially. The main point to consider about our summer gathering in June: If you come you will be surrounded by really good people and will be expected to get face time with them. We are confident that we have a gravity of relationships that attracts really wonderful, high quality people and I can prove it. When you come you may get to meet a whole host of key leaders and many, many more of our friends that will thoroughly impress you and may become your friends for life. Our special leadership for each retreat will be posted online, but we always try to invite and honor some true fathers of the faith.

Why Our Gathering is not a Conference

Well, I don’t mean conferences any harm. They are perfectly fine, and it is nice to focus on a particular thing over a few days with meetings and teachings, etc., but I must break that expectation in you about the Village Gatherings. I think that most people expect a conference to be a series of planned meetings with a series of profile speakers. Most folks view conferences as a chance to come together, attend a few meetings, and then sneak out with their new friends to a pub or the hotel pool and really get some hang time. Our gathering is just the other way around. We providing a beautiful village location for great folks to come together and get some serious hang time with others of like mind and like heart, and as a byproduct we will enjoy our gathering times together. It is true that as we enjoy this time together we will also receive some significant downloads from Worship Circle leaders and teachers on very important foundational themes, but don’t expect even the teachers themselves to believe that their awesome download is the center of the action. Ha. The center of our action for the weekend is you. We reserve the right to limit reservations for adults to preserve our sense of family and connection time with you. That’s right, we want to be able to focus on you. We want to really see you with our eyes and have a chance to hear you. I will tell you what we expect from you. We expect each person at the Village Gathering to aggressively pursue conversations, relationships, the sharing of food and picnic blankets, the sharing of jokes and fears, hugs and kisses as though there was no other purpose for being there at all.

Circle of Relationship

Prioritizing relationships is absolutely natural and it is necessary to be healthy. First, we know that we are to love one another without prejudice. “Without prejudice” means that we freely offer our love to those of different shapes, sizes, experience, thoughts, etc. because God has made us this way. Secondly, we know that some are to receive a greater portion of access to our love and attention. These two things are not in conflict. We may love our neighborhood, but we offer our dinner table first to our own family, and then to guests from the neighborhood when the timing and connection is right. You are our neighbors and we think this retreat will be the perfect time to share our relational table together! The Village Gathering idea was birthed from a prioritizing of love and attention to our closest spheres of relationship, first, and then it grew to include a weekend called Worship@8500, and we now know them as Village Gatherings. It was not the other way around. We did not dream up the idea of a worship music festival because we needed to do a festival for music promotions or artist showcases in any way. That’s crazy talk. We have been hosting annual gatherings of spiritual family and close friends since 2001. We used to do these in January in the mountains. After taking a break from this larger gathering for a year or two we decided that we would shift that invitation to the summer and create a week where our closest long term relationships could come together around informal campfires, porches, and dinner tables here in Woodland Park in 2009. These invitations were personal and were not posted to the internet. You see, the Village Gathering is just an expansion of our family gathering and by hosting in several locations we have a better chance to see all of you! 

Meetings We Have Planned

Yes, we actually do have meetings on all three days. It’s pretty simple really. In the mornings from around 9-12 in the morning we will gather the whole group together in our incredible meeting space.  I (Ben) will take a key role in this morning download, but in some ways I will just be the MC for helping many excellent folks get introduced to you. In the afternoons we are going to invite people to divide up and join in smaller groups of affection and interest inside spaces scattered around the village. This is an optional time where different folks may lead groups focused on topics like: praying for one another’s physical needs, sharing experiences in booking house concerts, praying to receive the Holy Spirit, understanding the prophetic gift, practicing forgiveness, receiving God’s love, becoming Kingdom people, or how we record our albums. These optional small groups are from around 2-4 or so. From about 7-10 pm each night we will gather together, again in a place where we can play music, dance, and enjoy one another. Bring your instruments and your hearts to just unwind our love for the Father together in view of the mountain summer sky. We may open this worship time up to the public if we feel that we have the space given our weekend registration as we would love to offer that as a treat to our local friends and family, but probably only one night, the opening night. We begin on Thursday night and end on Saturday night.

Our Dreams for You

We dream that this weekend will recharge your soul. We pray rest for the weary, and the kind of rest that comes from the restoration of sonship so that you can constantly rest in the Father’s great love and favor that He has poured out on you. We pray for new vision of the beauty of the Church that Jesus loves, and the transcendent power and permanence of the Kingdom of God. We believe that a weekend like this will forever lay foundations under you that will enrich your ministry work, your family life, and your ability to enjoy your dreams. We dream that you will make new, life long friends. We pray that you will obsess about coming back to be with us next year, but that you will allow that obsession to spill over into your own sense of gathering good people together all year long. We hope you will spend some time with us throughout the year as a result of getting a bit closer, and giving and receiving a little more permission from one another.