What’s New This Year?
Gathering As A Gift
Why Our Gathering is Not a Conference
Circles of Relationship
Meetings We Have Planned
What We Dream for You
DATES: LOOKING FORWARD TO Friday, June 24 – Sunday, June 26th, 2011
Worship@8500 is now a three day family retreat, kingdom life training, and worship music gathering and you are invited! We want to be part of your summer! Join us for three days of worship, fellowship and encouragement in the high country with the Worship Circle family. 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 in the beautiful high country of Colorado 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 worship jams, and this year we will invite everyone at the gathering to sit in with us in the nightly, huge Worship Circle jams!
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 Tim and Laurie, Aaron, Karla and Gary, Rocky and Julie, Chris and Tiffany, Mark and Mary Jean, Joe and Angie, Tim and Betony, David and Ally, Jason and Stephanie, Ben and Taphath, James and Scarlett, Kelly, David and Carol, David and Lisa, Jeff and Shelly, Conan and Erin, Josh, Matt, Michelle, and many, many more that will thoroughly impress you and may become your friends for life.
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 Worship@8500. 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, quiet location for great folks to come together and get some serious hang time with others of like mind and like heart. The Lost Dutchman Resort (where we are hosting the retreat) is your pub and hotel pool (without the swimming or the alcohol.) 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. Even though the building and grounds can handle way, way over 400 people we have capped the registration at 180 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 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.
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 summer, June 24-26th, 2011, is the perfect time to share our relational table together! This summer’s gathering 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. It was not the other way around. We did not dream up the idea of 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. These invitations were personal and were not posted to the internet. The weekend of June 24-26th, 2011 is a weekend where you have the opportunity to join us after my closest family have had four solid days together relaxing and enjoying one another. You see, Worship@8500 is just an expansion of our family gathering. It is a place for us to share our lives together with 100 more really awesome people…some we know and some we have yet to meet. This year, every night we will have a chance to cap off each day with a ridiculous worship celebration playing music with our best friends, grilling burgers, and running around a high country hillsides with as many people as want to come who are in love with Jesus and would love to spend time together.
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 that has an indoor stream, wide open doors to the sky, couches, chairs, etc. Our meeting space is sort of combination of indoors and outdoors which is a real blessing because we learned last year that too much fun in the sun at 8,500 feet above sea level can just drain the juice right out of you! During these gatherings we will download some awesome encouragements from the Scripture and share some of the gold of our lives with you. 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 tent spaces scattered around the forests, streams and ponds of the resort. This is an optional time where different folks may lead tents 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. This is just a collection of topics that we will decide on as we go. We will make the decision on these afternoon tents after we meet you all and get a feeling for where we might all be headed. These optional small groups are from around 2-4 or so.
From about 7-10 pm each night we will gather together, again in the incredible Lost Dutchman Pavilion indoor/outdoor facility and enjoy worshiping together. Bring you 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 maybe only two of the three nights we are together.
The rest of the time we expect you to share your meals, share your blankets, your tents, your walks through the Aspen trees, and the shade of the meeting tents with one another as the family of God enjoying one another. Take a nap. Run around with your kids. Make campfire coffee. At 8pm every night we are providing a large fire and S’Mores for everyone to enjoy into the evening!
If you sleep offsite at a State Park or a hotel, then you will be able to come and go as you please, but we ask you to arrive by 9 am and leave to head out of the Lost Dutchman Resort area by 11 pm every night.
*Please don’t forget to bring your folding chairs and blankets for gatherings and hang times!
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.
You are invited to join the folks at Enter the Worship Circle for an incredible weekend of encouragement, equipping, worship and friendship building! This is our second annual Worship@8500 gathering, but this year it lasts for three days! Won’t you make plans to join us?
