It takes a small army!

For the past 7 years, the entire LifeSite staff and boards of directors (U.S. and Canada) have gathered for an annual 3-day retreat – a treasured time during which we engage in intensive planning sessions, as well as much-needed fellowship and spiritual refreshment.

However, I think I can say that this year’s retreat, held last month in Virginia, was the most impressive and productive yet. The photos in the slideshow and other information included below, will probably surprise many readers.

We often find that many of our readers, particularly our newer ones, don’t realize the scope of this mission – not only the huge audience that LifeSite reaches, but also how many people are required to ensure that this international news agency functions as well as it does every day.

So, every now and then we publish a report such as this to help everyone understand the extent of the constantly growing LifeSite truth-in-news team and mission.

This should also help you to understand why we set the dollar goals that we do for each of our quarterly campaigns.

LifeSite is now a world leader in the work that we do. There simply is no other international pro-life and pro-family news organization like LifeSite.

Keeping this mission humming along therefore requires a sufficient number of staff with the needed professional experience and qualifications.

And yet, we take pride in the fact we achieve much more per dollar spent than many other non-profits of a similar size, due in large part to the intense commitment of everyone involved, many of whom have willingly sacrificed a great deal to work for this organization, including a significant number of essential persons, such as our board members and some part-time writers, who give to this mission voluntarily.

The photo at the top of this article shows you the staff, the spiritual director, board members and some LifeSite cooperators at the retreat. As you can see, it takes a small army to keep LifeSite going! Not to mention our website developers, graphic designers, accountants, lawyers and a host of other contracted professional services.

There were 37 participants this year, up from 26 the year before. And that did not include our three European, one Mexican, one New Zealand, and one Australian writers, and our newly-hired assistant director of marketing.

Our annual retreats have now become the highlight of our year. We enjoy meeting in person the team members who we otherwise only know from telephone and Skype conference calls!

Almost everyone works from their homes in various nations – an arrangement that cuts down our overhead significantly since we don’t have to maintain a large central office. We have a small, one-room office in the Human Life International building in Front Royal, Virginia and one journalist works out of a cubicle at the head office of Canada’s Campaign Life Coalition (CLC) in Toronto.

At this year’s retreat we had several sessions dedicated to professional development, spiritual talks by renowned Catholic author Michael O’Brien and another by a well-known Catholic priest-writer, a supporter relations session, a fiery brainstorming session in which our staff and board honestly assessed areas of weakness at LifeSite and discussed ways to continue to improve, and a session analyzing our web traffic and developing concrete plans to continue to grow our audience.

For our Catholic staff, every day begins with the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, and ends with the daily Rosary. Confessions are available the entire weekend.Every single session begins with prayer.

In the evenings we gather for fellowship and, as you might expect with such a passionate team, discuss and debate well into the night. We always leave the weekend re-charged, spiritually renewed and with concrete goals to pursue.

And then it’s back into the maelstrom: breaking stories to research and write on some of the most difficult and controversial issues of the day, a brand-new and rapidly growing magazine for Catholics to keep rolling off the presses, social media pages with 800,000+ followers to manage, several million visitors a month to serve, speeches to be delivered, conferences to attend, and television and radio programs to appear on.

The news business can be fast-paced and draining – especially given our focus on difficult and controversial issues like abortion, euthanasia, homosexuality, pornography, the growing attacks on our freedoms, complex theological issues, the intricacies of Vatican politics, and others.

That’s why we made the commitment to organize these annual retreats. That’s why we start every working day with prayer via a staff-wide prayer call.

And that’s why we always tell new hires that developing their personal prayer life is absolutely vital if they are to survive the job – for without it, we risk losing perspective and hope, and possibly burning out.

At LifeSite we know that our hope is in the Lord. Our annual retreat is a powerful way of reminding ourselves of this fact.

Now, we forge onwards, working as if everything depended on us, but praying as if it all depended on God – as, indeed, it ultimately does.

I hope that helps you to better understand how very much LifeSite relies on the donations of its readers.

With just 6 days left in our fall fundraising campaign, we still have $159,142 left to raise.

Please, if you support this mission to defend life, family, faith and freedom in the media, donate today.