About
Coldwater exists to provide educational and outdoor leadership programs that foster growth and maturity in people. In Coldwater programs, learning is experiential - that is, participants are invited into the process of discovery:
- Discovery of who they are and what they bring to community.
- Discovery of who others are and respecting differences between people.
- Discovery of the wonder and wildness of a God who is alive, and who pursues us, and who makes us into the kinds of people He teaches we should be.
Foundations that give shape to a Coldwater Program
Spiritual Formation
In Richard Foster’s Celebration of Discipline, the oft-quoted Foster laments the decline of spiritual depth in our culture. He says,
The desperate need today is not for a greater number of intelligent people, or gifted people, but for deep people.
At Coldwater, when we design an experience for a group of people, we think about encouraging and promoting depth in a persons life. But it is not simply thinking deeply or feeling deeply that we are after. We want people to live deeply. The goal of spiritual formation is an enduring depth evidenced by the way one lives.
“…until Christ is formed in you.”
Community
In books like Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Life Together, Victor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, and Henri Nouwen’s, Reaching Out, we read that the significance of a person’s life cannot be held separate from the community in which they dwell. Community and how we choose to live in it, gives shape to our lives. It is the vehicle by which we might grow. As Wendell Berry says, “we cannot learn to be better than we are from ourselves.” Of course, this is not contemporary wisdom, but wisdom passed down through our faith heritage. In his letter to the Ephesians, Saint Paul reminds the newly formed community that they are “members of each other”. Membership to one another means paying attention to the needs of your neighbor. A Coldwater experience means practicing this attention to others, being available to serve others and to be served by others.
There can be no maturity in the spiritual life, no obedience in following Jesus, no wholeness in the Christian life apart from an immersion and embrace of community. I am not myself by myself. Community, not the highly vaunted individualism of our culture, is the setting in which Christ is at play.
– Eugene Peterson
Leadership
In the same way that we learn the value of community by living in and being dependant on community, we learn leadership by leading. Leading and what we learn through leading is core to a Coldwater experience. As Coldwater programs take place in the adventure setting and in the wilderness, leadership skills are nurtured in the outdoor environment and are appropriate to the backcountry setting. The leader shaped in the beauty and harshness of the wilderness classroom has skills adaptable to any leadership setting.