Refuge
Refuge Groups for Fall 2025 are open for signups!
Questions? Contact refuge@idcpdx.com
“Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” - Mary Oliver
An unexamined life is like a gift ungiven. Refuge is a courageous community committed to mental, spiritual, and emotional healing and flourishing. We believe transformation happens in the good soil of honest self-reflection, accountability, acceptance, and encouragement.
Do you feel stuck in unhealthy patterns of behavior or relationships? Have you experienced trauma or loss? Are you ready to be free IN circumstances you’re not yet free FROM? Refuge strives to be a community where Christ’s compassion finds its best expression in our very real human struggles.
All Refuge Groups meet on Monday nights and childcare is available. See below for our group descriptions and details for each.
Contact refuge@idcpdx.com for any questions.
Refuge Groups
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If we want to change who we are and what we do, we have to change our heart. Genesis groups help us to identify destructive behaviors, or areas where we’re just stuck, and take practical steps towards real change with accountability and support. Whether the issue is anxiety, anger, alcohol, drug or food abuse, a negative, critical attitude, or spiritual stagnation, a Change Group will help you find new freedom in understanding deeper impulses.
This group is offered separately for men and women.
14 weeks
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Grief—with its misery and feelings of powerlessness—is a journey none of us chooses. Sometimes it helps to have others with us as we move along the often complicated path to wholeness. This group is for anyone experiencing and/or processing a loss.
Two class offerings: An in-person group, and a virtual group
Coed groups
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The title says it all. Many of us can point to areas of suffering in our lives, triggers, and destructive patterns. However, most of us have no idea how to identify the heartbreak or beliefs at the root of our behavior. This group is a safe place to go deep, learn coping mechanisms, and chart a path to emotional and spiritual healing.
This group is offered for women.
10 weeks
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You don’t have to be “artistic” to express yourself through art. In this group, we leverage the creative process to understand and express our emotions. Using the psalms as a springboard, skilled instructors guide us through various art projects designed to connect us to the Holy Spirit and to our own inner landscape. This group is for anyone—with any or no level of art ability—processing hard-to-reach feelings or struggling to put those feelings into words.
No art expertise or experience necessary to join this group and all supplies will be provided!
Coed group
10 weeks
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Explore the landscape of your beliefs and choices through the lens of the parable of the Prodigal Son. Using resources from author and therapist Dr. Andrew Bauman, this group is for men who want to examine and understand their personal and relational struggles, and the needs revealed by them. Discover, in a safe space with other men, an effective process for real change and true healing.
This group is offered for men.
10 weeks
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Always open to everyone. No registration necessary. These are one-,two-, or three-week miniseries—a “tasting menu” of ideas and themes explored in spiritual, mental and emotional health. Open group is for people who are: 1) not a part of a regular Refuge group, 2) interested in finding out more about Refuge, or 3) ready to start their inner work, but aren’t quite ready to go deep with a regular weekly group.
This ongoing group will be open for both men and women.