Directing a New Student Retreat? nbd
- Campus Light College Church
- 7 days ago
- 5 min read
Are you an incoming student @ Rutgers? 🥳 Congrats!! Kick off your college experience with the Scarlet to White Retreat, hosted right on campus on August 14-16! It's not too late to sign up 👀
The Northeast region of the United States is notorious among many campus ministries as a difficult region to minister to. While many ministries thrive in the “Bible Belt” of the South, they never seem to draw as many students in the Northeast. The Oaks Collaborative is a ministry that started in the south, at Auburn University in Alabama. They work to plant retreats for incoming college freshmen that help them find their place and focus on living for Christ in college. The Oaks Retreat at Auburn University needs four sessions to accommodate all its students, with 1,200+ incoming students joining (~20% of the incoming class!) and 200+ upperclassmen staff helping to run the retreat. The Scarlet to White Retreat on the other hand… well, our first retreat almost didn’t happen.
Let me introduce myself – Hi, I’m Helene! I just finished my senior year at Rutgers and will be going into my 5th year at Rutgers for the Fall 2026 semester. I’m a Leadership & Management and English major, with a Creative Writing minor. I go to Campus Light Church every Sunday, you can frequently find me reading and crocheting, and my Rutgers hot take is that Brower was the best dining hall (before they closed it… this is a VERY hot take). For the past two years, I have had the honor of serving as the Director of the Scarlet to White Retreat at Rutgers University, which is a 3-day, 2-night retreat for incoming Rutgers students to find their place before the school year starts, and to help them find a Christian community that can keep them rooted in Christ throughout their college years. Our Rutgers retreat was started by the Oaks Collaborative in 2025, and our 2026 retreat in August will be our second one.
Usually, retreats through the Oaks Collaborative start planning as soon as the previous one ends. The day after the retreat, leadership applications open; it’s a year-round cycle. The first Scarlet to White only really started coming together in March of 2025. We had six months to put together a whole retreat – half the time most retreats have. With no experience having led something of this scale before, I got right to it. Checking the master spreadsheet, scheduling frequent calls with Oaks Collaborative staff, reviewing documents, contacting churches – I was trying to do it all. (Don’t get the wrong idea, I was also a frequent procrastinator and sometimes waited days to answer emails).
Every week, we had a Scarlet to White Bible study call where we went over the book of Nehemiah. Every week, I would be asked if we had any news on student registrations. And every week, it killed me to always answer, “No, not yet.” No, we didn’t have any students one month before the registration deadline. No, we didn’t have any students the week before the registration deadline. It felt even worse when parents would ask me about how many other students we had registered.
The week of the registration deadline, the pastor of my church gave a sermon on Jairus’s daughter, from Luke 8:40-56. In this account, Jesus is approached by two people, a woman who has been bleeding for twelve years and a man, Jairus, whose daughter was dying. Although Jairus made his request to Jesus first, Jesus took time to speak with the woman who had been bleeding. By the time Jesus is ready to go with Jairus, he’s told not to bother, as Jairus’s daughter has already died. But Jesus insists on going to Jairus’s daughter, telling those mourning her to stop. When Jesus arrives, he tells the girl to get up, and “Her spirit returned, and at once she stood up.” (Luke 8:55, NIV) While there are a great many number of lessons to be learned from this story, the one I remembered that day is that sometimes God’s timing is planned so that a greater miracle can be worked. Jesus could have healed Jairus’s daughter from her sickness, but instead he waited and raised her from the dead. Despite facing death, Jairus didn’t lose faith that Jesus could help his daughter. What is the opposite of courage? It’s faith, not fear.
Just a few days later, 24 hours before we would cancel the Scarlet to White retreat due to a lack of registrations, our first student registered.
Then another.
And another.
Within 48 hours, we had 11 students registered for the 2025 Scarlet to White Retreat. A retreat that would be happening because we did have students.
If our students had registered at scattered times throughout the summer, of course, we would have been excited. But there’s something about 11 registrations happening in rapid succession after a summer of waiting for them that felt so… well, miraculous. I am under no delusion that it was by my hands, or the hands of my staff, that the first ever Scarlet to White Retreat occurred. Now, whenever I hear the story of Jairus’s daughter, I am reminded of my first experience directing a retreat. By the time our first students registered, we had basically given up, and the leadership team had almost entirely stopped making progress on the tasks needed to prepare for the retreat. After all, we didn’t want to spend any more time on something that we increasingly believed wouldn’t happen. Now, having eleven registrations, we had to scramble to make up for lost time and complete all the retreat preparations. Like Gideon, our scrappy team was facing a task that, by all human accounts, was impossible, starting with the impossible 11 registrations. That retreat was held together by God alone.
I am currently serving as Director for the 2026 Scarlet to White Retreat. We’ve had a full year to plan this retreat. Our deadlines are manageable, and we’ve had opportunities to promote our retreat across campus. This year, our staff has grown and includes four of the original freshmen attendees – more than one-third of the original eleven. As I write this post, there are still eight weeks until the Scarlet to White Retreat. Eight weeks out, and we already have our first two students registered. When I heard the news of our first registrations, I felt a lot of things. Joy, excitement, gratitude, to name a few. But not surprise. This year, I put all my faith in God, knowing that He would provide. I wasn’t surprised by our first registrations because I knew they would happen in God’s great timing.
Praise God from whom all blessings flow!
The author of this post is Helene H., student leader @ Campus Light 2025-2026.
If you have any questions about anything in this post or activities for incoming students @ Rutgers, don’t hesitate to reach out!