Church Retreats

UU Church Pre- and Post-Season Weekends
A weekend retreat at Ferry Beach is a time to build community within your congregation. Your weekend begins on Friday at 4:00 p.m. and ends on Sunday at 2:00 p.m. Meals are provided in our 2000 square ft. dining hall by chef Richard O’Brien of Pangea Food Service. Pangea is in its second decade of providing high quality, delicious, and reasonably priced meals to Ferry Beach guests.

Ferry Beach provides the basic framework for the planning of your weekend, such as site rules and guidelines, cleaning guidelines, and rooming charts; but the actual running of your weekend is in your hands. You do the rooming assignments, check your people in, collect the money, assign tasks, decide the agenda, and so forth. Ferry Beach can certainly advise in this process, but it seems to work best when the group creates a weekend that is uniquely theirs.

If renting all three buildings, you will have access to Rowland Hall (except the Art Room), Quillen and Underwood. Together, these three dormitories have the capacity to sleep up to 190 people. Your group has the option of hiring our cleaning contractor to clean the dorms, or to perform the cleaning yourselves. You also have full use of the Rose Pavilion and the Eleanor B. Forbes memorial chapel, a beautiful outdoor gathering place for worship and reflection. Gardiner, Claflin, Kelley, and the four cottages are used by the Ferry Beach Ecology School as residences; therefore, they are unavailable and off-limits. Outdoor facilities such as the tennis court (minus net), the basketball court, the volleyball court, the playgrounds, and the beach are still open for your enjoyment. The Ferry Beach Store, which sells ice cream, Ferry Beach clothing and collectibles, and various sundries, will be open for approximately two hours each day beginning in either the late morning or early afternoon.

Dormitory rentals are on a per building, per night basis. Camping space is individually charged per site. Meal costs are calculated based on per head pricing for children and adults, based on 5 meals chosen from either a premium or deluxe menu. There is no charge for the use of meeting spaces, the Rowland Hall Auditorium, or any of the Ferry Beach equipment.

To finance their retreat, most groups collect per head charges for children and adults, often setting a maximum household cost to make participation financially feasible for larger families. As well, many congregations provide scholarship opportunities for their members based on need.

Some churches may not be large enough to have a retreat on their own so there is an option to double up for the weekend with another church. This actually brings many pluses including the opportunity to meet compatible people from other UU churches and do some joint activities. In such cases, dining will be communal and the use of meeting space will be agreed to by all renting parties beforehand in conjunction with a first come, first served philosophy.

Contact Ed Mann, Operations Director, at the Ferry Beach winter office or by e-mail at fbed@maine.rr.com to see which weekends might be open and which churches might like to share the property.

Ferry Beach Ecology School
Ferry Beach Ecology School (FBES) is a non-profit educational organization dedicated to providing ecological education to 3rd-8th grade classes. It operates on the Ferry Beach campus in the fall and spring. Its interdisciplinary ecology curriculum focuses on teaching hands-on lessons in basic ecology by using the outdoors as a classroom-- a classroom where learning occurs through exploration, scientific investigation, discovery and sensory awareness. FBES naturalists take students to a variety of ecosystems including ocean, dunes & beaches, forests, rocky tide pools and salt marshes. During the Spring and Fall terms, FBES offers 4 and 5 day residential programs, as well as day programs and outreach programs to public and private schools.