Greater Northwest 5 Day Academy
The GNW 5 Day Advisory Board & Leadership Team has announced the theme for our next 5 Day gathering: The Gifts of Darkness. We invite you to enter into this enriching week of exploration.
We’re taught to fear and flee darkness and dark times. But the gifts of God’s presence await when we learn to face and befriend the dark.
People are invited to save the date and consider attending, April21-26, 2026, at the Archbishop Brunett Retreat Center at the Palisades in Federal Way, WA.
Registration is expected to open in the fall of 2025. Registration Fee* will include tuition, private room & bath, and all meals.
*The cost will be determined soon and scholarships will be available.
We plan to open registration in early November.
We’re grateful to have received a generous donation toward the retreat center costs, and invite you to consider contributing to the Greater Northwest Academy for Spiritual Formation, or to sponsor a participant.
Academy faculty
Rachel Barenblat’s vocations include poet, rabbi, spiritual director, and parent. Co-founder of Bayit, a Jewish spiritual innovation incubator, she has blogged as the Velveteen Rabbi since 2003. She holds in MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars, and is author of several volumes of poetry, among them Crossing the Sea and Texts to the Holy. She teaches at the intersection of creative life and spiritual life. She serves Congregation Beth Israel of the Berkshires, and lives in western Massachusetts with her son.
Juan Carlos Huertas is a follower of Jesus, husband, father, spiritual director, and Minister of Proclamation and Practice of Justice at First-Plymouth CongregationalChurch in Lincoln, NE. He holds a Master of Divinity from Emory University, and a Bachelor of Arts from Louisiana College in Pineville, LA where he majored in Religion and minored in Spanish—his first language growing up in San Juan, Puerto Rico. He is committed to practices that move communities to liberation through shared wisdom, communal leadership, and contextual action.
