Including Other Churches

For years, we have invited small Calvary Chapels in our region to join us for our retreats.  This website was created to encourage churches of every size to consider doing their own retreats for their women; however, there may be others who want to join you and learn from you before they do their own.  Or it just may make more sense economically and practically to combine efforts when doing a bigger event such as a women’s retreat.  If you do invite other churches to join you, here are a few things that we have learned over the years:

We send other churches information and registration materials far in advance, and we ask them to handle their own registration and rooming.  They set their own cut-off date for registration for their women, based on the date that we have given them that we need their list of women attending and full payment to guarantee the rooms.  We normally require this information from outside churches at least a week before our own registration cut-off date.  Payment to us is final, so if they have women cancel at the last minute, they are asked to find someone to fill the reserved space.  We also ask them to do their own rooming.  Trust me, this saves you a lot of headaches, because you will already be dealing with your own ladies and their late payments and/or cancellations, as well as rooming issues.

On the Retreat-in-a-Bag website, we have a downloadable copy of the letter we send with registration materials to other churches.  Check it out here.