I’ll be honest with you. I REALLY wasn’t looking forward to camp. I had a lot of preconceived notions about what Christian summer camp was about based on my own experience growing up and what I’d experienced in youth ministry throughout the year.
OTHER CAMPS I’VE ATTENDED:
While the fun activities are pretty typical (pool, outdoor sports, arts and crafts, etc.) the underlying Christian message would be, “get saved or else.” It usually involved overly charasmatic speakers and high production value that was incessantly repeated throughout the week and ended with emotionally worn down children and teens dedicating and rededicating their lives to Christ.
While I appreciate and even encourage teen dedication to their faith, the camp’s execution of that goal was wholly un-Christ-like. It created guilt and fear driven decisions rather than life-changing, loving relationships with their God. There was a sense that the teens weren’t good enough for the gift God had given them. The staff implicitly suggested that a decision was necessary that week or their eternal destination was in question. Teens would line the pool at the end of camp ready to be baptized and re-baptized, their motivation unclear but their acceptance assured by the praise and excitement that the staff would create.
As a teen, it created a lot of anxiety and confusion in my own faith journey. As a youth leader, it created a hurricane of emotion, leaving a wake of damage that the other youth leaders and I would have to clean up. In the end, it tended to do more harm than good.
HIGHER GROUND:
From the first chapel, I knew this was going to be different. The message was clear and carried throughout the whole week, “God loves you…NO MATTER WHAT!” Between our worship leader (an Aussie who volunteered her time and flew here JUST for the camp, check Vanessa Kersting out here) and Paul David “PD” Kurts’s messages, they created an environment where the Holy Spirit could be present, not pressured. With the theme of “Oasis”, our chapel services centered on how Creator, Son, and Holy Spirit are an oasis from the deserts of our lives. It wasn’t high production or overly emotional, it was honest, loving and (for me especially) REFRESHING! Each chapel ended with a chance to debrief and allow the counselors to take the conversation deeper and more applicable to each age and gender group.
The staff (myself included) sought to weave that same message throughout all of the activities and talks we had with the campers all week long. The girls learned what it meant to be a Christian woman. The guys learned what it meant to be a “real man” (PROKOPTO!).
I can’t say much about it from the girl’s perspective (Elizabeth wouldn’t let me in the tent! 
) but the guy’s experienced God’s love in the shaping of metal. On Thursday, after a war-like game of capture the flag (seriously people, these campers were a little scary), the older dorms of boys were led to the forge where Bill Winn worked a red-hot metal into the shape of a sword. As the flames died down and the steel cooled, he told the men about a Greek word in the Bible, PROKOPTO, which means to be shaped, blow by blow. This word was used to describe Jesus as he grew up before his ministry. That word became the focus of how God works in our boys and young men to shape us into the men we were created to be. At the end, we were each given a medallion with the word, PROKOPTO, stamped into it. It became a battle cry for the men for the rest of camp and you may even hear it in the halls of CNX.
And in the end, walls came crashing down, relationships were healed and made, and true beginnings to faith and adult maturity emerged. As PD put it, “we saw miracles happen.” And they weren’t the “we saved all the campers this year” kind of miracles. They weren’t the “did you see how many people we baptized,” kind of miracles. It wasn’t about numbers or statistics. It wasn’t about meeting some cosmic salvation goal. It was about finding the thirsty and leading them to the Oasis. It was about finding the broken and offering them help. It was about honest discussion and genuine conversation. It was about creating authentic relationship between campers, staff, and God. And for that, my attitude for summer camp, specifically Higher Ground, has been forever changed.
PROKOPTO!!!
