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Holy Week resources and reflections

Presbyterian camps/conferences movement celebrates 100 years

As Presbyterians celebrate the 100th anniversary of camp and conference ministry in 2008, one trend they're noticing is towards diversity. While there isn't any shortage of the traditional campfires and canoeing, there's also a move towards innovative programming that builds on the passions and strengths of particular locations.

At Calvin Center near Atlanta, for example, people who want to learn more about international mission work -- often in preparation for short-term mission trips -- come to its "Global Village," where they live in conditions designed to represent what they would find in Haiti, Nicaragua, Kenya, Palestine, or a barrio.

As Presbyterians celebrate the 100th anniversary of camp and conference ministry in 2008, one trend they’re noticing is towards diversity. While there isn’t any shortage of the traditional campfires and canoeing, there’s also a move towards innovative programming that builds on the passions and strengths of particular locations.

At Calvin Center near Atlanta, for example, people who want to learn more about international mission work — often in preparation for short-term mission trips — come to its “Global Village,” where they live in conditions designed to represent what they would find in Haiti, Nicaragua, Kenya, Palestine, or a barrio.

“They live life as much as possible comparable to the people there,” sometimes with no electricity and no running water, said Hein Vingerling, director of facilities and mission projects at Calvin, which is owned by the Presbytery of Greater Atlanta. “They have very little income, do a lot of manual labor, go the market in the morning to buy food and find out how expensive it is and how little they can buy with the money they earn.”

They might go to bed, and wake up in the morning to discover the water has become tainted and undrinkable.

There’s no calling mom on the cell phone to say, “Come pick me up.”

Celebration and innovation

This is a season of celebration. Although not a recognized movement until later, the beginning of Presbyterian camp and conference ministry is measured from the 1908 opening of Camp Kosciusko in Winona Lake, Ind. That 100th anniversary is this year’s focus, with the theme, “100 years of Sacred Space,” said Suzanne Getz Bates, who is coordinating the celebration. She is director of Camp Westminster on Higgins Lake in Michigan.

The Presbyterian Church Camp and Conference Association (PCCCA) has been providing educational support, nurture, and fellowship for its membership for more than 37 years, according to its Web site, www.pccca.net. It represents more than 140 Presbyterian-affiliated camps and conference centers with 1.5 million person days of usage by children, youth, and adults who attend camps, conferences, and retreats during the course of each year,

It’s also a season of innovation. After a century of experience, the programming is evolving — both to meet financial challenges and to stay fresh and in tune with the world’s needs.

PCCCA is working with Presbyterians for Restoring Creation, for example, to offer eco-stewardship training at a variety of sites. Together they have created the Presbyterian Conservation Corps, which trains young adults to help our environment.

The range of programming Presbyterian camps and conference centers offer these days includes intensive wilderness experiences; “family camps” or intergenerational camps for grandparents to come with their grandchildren; confirmation camps and elder training; and spiritual retreats for people to walk a labyrinth or spend time in quiet contemplation.

Last summer, Calvin Center took 200 teenagers to work for a week in inner city neighborhoods, repairing houses.

“We’re typically fairly well-to-do in the Presbyterian church,” Vingerling said. “They go to places they would normally never go to,” and meet people whose roofs leak and who don’t have enough food in their refrigerators to get them through the week.

“It’s definitely a swing away from the traditional camp programs,” many of which were “inward-focused,” Vingelring said. “We can’t be in that sheltered little environment all the time.” And “we don’t have to travel all the way to a foreign country to find people who need help.”

But while the programming might be changing, what has stayed consistent through the years is a Christian foundation and the recognition that, according to polls done through the decades, the experiences people have at the Presbyterian camps and conference centers can play a pivotal role in molding their faith. They may stay for just a short time, but what happens there, surrounded by a visceral sense of God’s creation, often sticks.

An August 2002 Presbyterian Panel report, for example, found that 64 percent of Presbyterian pastors described camps and retreats as having contributed to their faith understanding by either a great or very great extent. About 70 percent of members and 90 percent of ministers could point to “one particular learning or spiritual growth experience that had great significance” in shaping their Christian life, and the most common setting for that was at camp.

“It’s a completely different experience,” Bates said. “You’re in nature, you’re with different people, you’re taken out of your comfort zone, and you’re really able to focus on what people are saying about God and faith.”

New challenges

At the same time, however, financial and staff support from the national church to camps and conference centers is declining. One result of that has been more flexibility and creativity, a recognition that financial success will depend on building on that tradition with new twists.

On Easter Sunday 2007, Donald A. Hostetter, who had dedicated much of his career to the ministry of Presbyterian camps and conference centers, died in Ireland after suffering a stroke while returning from leading a tour group to Greece. Since then, a fund to honor his contributions and to raise money to once again support a national staff position for Presbyterian camping has been established with the Presbyterian Foundation.

Hostetter’s son, Mark, is a Presbyterian minister and lawyer who manages a hedge fund and is an associate pastor of stewardship and mission to the corporate world at First Church in New York City. He grew up in a family dedicated to Presbyterian camping and says that, like so many others, “in some ways my faith was formed by it.”

His father for years ran Holmes Presbyterian Camp & Conference Center in upstate New York, and “I know every inch and every rock and every hill and every tree of the camp,” Hostetter said. “I felt a part of that, I felt a part of God’s creation, I felt in some ways I belonged to it. … These are holy places, holy ground. They’re sacred places, like sanctuaries of churches.”

But as much as he appreciates that sense of history and connectedness, Hostetter also recognizes the need for new ways of doing things.

“Things are much more done on the local and regional level, with fewer members, and fewer dollars going to the national church,” he said.

In part because of that, a support structure has emerged in recent years at the grassroots level, with the Presbyterian Church Camp and Conference Association developing a network of consultants to provide expertise and holding annual gatherings where people who work in maintenance and programming can gather to share best practices and toss around ideas.

So far, the fund set up to honor Donald Hostetter’s memory has raised more than $1.2 million of the $3.3 million campaign, Mark Hostetter said, in part because “you’ve got allies in so many different places” in support of this type of ministry.

At the same time, however, he also sees the needs for new approaches.

“The trends in society have changed,” Hostetter said. At retreats and conferences, “No one wants to be in an uninsulated cabin with cold water and gang showers down the road.”

Many of the conference centers have created “communications rooms” with Internet access, and the facilities try to book usage outside of the peak summer months by reaching out to nonprofit and other groups that want to hold gatherings or retreats.

At Camp Westminster, which is run by Westminster Church of Detroit, mission work groups come from across the country to spend quiet time and provide volunteer work to maintain the camp, doing everything from electrical work to roofing.

A Catholic school holds its father-son weekend every year at the camp. A “Ski for Life” group comes to take visually-impaired people cross-country skiing. Women come to quilt; a “You and Me” camp is for children and any significant adult in their lives.

Last summer, campers came from overseas and from Colorado, from both inner-city Detroit and the suburbs — a real mix. And the camp’s staff came from as far away as Ireland and South Africa.

The day’s routine includes a morning watch by the lake; interactive Bible study; evening vespers, and cabin devotions before bed.

“There’s such an openness to these ideas” in teenagers and young adults, Hostetter said. “The friends they make, the theology they develop, last a lifetime. It’s a critical time to get these kids engaged in the church and in their relationship with God.”

 

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