Fall Clergy Retreat 2025
From Tuesday, September 23 at 4:00pm to Thursday, September 25, 2025 at 1:00pm
Pallottine Renewal Center
Address: 15270 Old Halls Ferry Rd, Florissant, MO 63034
Speaker: The Rev. Dr. Charlie Baczyk-Bell
Topic: Hope in Tribulation: Journeying Times of Trial with the Psalms
Cost: $175 for overnight guests, $100 for commuters
Registration deadline: September 3, 2025
Check in: 4 pm, 9/23
Check out: 9 am to be out of rooms, with programming ending at 1 pm on 9/25
Please note: On September 25 from ~1 pm - 4 pm (immediately following the conclusion of the Fall Clergy Retreat) there will be a Mass Class with Bishop Deon for those who have not gone through a mass class previously. This will take place in the chapel at Pallottine.
Full schedule to come!
If you need to be reimbursed for childcare or have any other questions, please contact Jillian Smith at jsmith@diocesemo.org, or 314-255-1370.
Register Here
More about our topic and speaker:
It is a truism to say that the world around us feels more uncertain and insecure than it has done for a long time, if ever before. Our public discourse coarsens, and trust weakens, tempting us to become people of angst and fear. We might know that we are people of the Jesus movement, children of the resurrection, yet the hope which sustains us can feel elusive, hard to grasp, impossible to summon.
Indeed, sometimes hope can seem to be the stuff of dreams – something nice to imagine, yet hard to believe in. Yet hope is not mere optimism: it is something freely gifted to us by God, that speaks of a world that will be and is being made new, of lives that will be and are being transformed, of communities of faith that already have within them the seeds of transfiguration. We are called to join in hope’s dance of grace, not pretending away our anxieties, fears, and concerns, nor even our frustrations with the God who created, sustained, and redeemed us, but to bring our whole selves, however imperfect we might feel we are.
During our time of retreat, we will spend time reflecting on the place that hope might play in our Christian life, together. We will do so by grounding ourselves in the ancient beauty of the psalms – words that teach us to pray, to trust, and to speak freely, openly, and honestly, with the God who is the source of our life, our love, our faith, and our hope.
The Rev. Dr. Charlie Baczyk-Bell is a Church of England priest and a forensic psychiatrist, Scholar in Residence at the Cathedral of St John the Divine in New York, and the Fellow in Medicine and Public Theology at Girton College, Cambridge. He teaches at several seminaries in England and has written a number of books of theology. His research interests are ecclesiology and anthropology – the latter from a psychiatric as well as a theological standpoint.