In some places, Presbyterian camps and conference centers are shutting down — as beloved as they may be, there’s just not enough money to keep going.
But Ferncliff in Little Rock, Ark., has a different, more positive story to tell.
Over the last 20 years, Ferncliff, the camp of Arkansas presbytery, has experienced slow but steady growth.
It’s found new life through innovation: by responding to incidents of school violence and, more recently, by becoming involved in disaster assistance efforts.
And the heart of its vision, according to Executive Director David Gill, is the realization that Ferncliff isn’t just a fun place to visit, but a center of mission and ministry as well.
Ferncliff was created in 1937 and, with about 1,200 acres, is one of the larger Presbyterian camp and conference centers. But it’s surviving by looking forward, not looking back.
For example, this year, Ellie Johnston, 17, is attending a new program created by Ferncliff, modeled on a program started by Second Church in Indianapolis — an in-depth study of the writings of the Apostle Paul, called “Footsteps in Faith.”
Last summer, Ellie — from First Church in Batesville, Ark. — went to a special camp for a week to study Paul’s epistles. The students in the program commit to writing six essays on Paul’s letters to the early church and to gather one Saturday a month through the school year to study Paul’s writings.
And in the summer of 2007, with financial support from a Presbyterian donor, the students will travel to Athens, Turkey, and Rome to follow in Paul’s path. The trip will cost about $5,000 each, but each student will pay only $1,000, thanks to the donor’s generosity.
Because of that, “little country churches that would never be able to offer that kind of program can plug in,” Gill said.
“Paul is wonderful, it’s so interesting,” Johnston said. “You read the Bible once, and you miss so much. Then you look at it again in a whole different way.”
Gill, 56, came to Ferncliff about a decade ago, after serving as pastor of churches in Indiana and working for Heifer International. He’s also the president of the Presbyterian Church Camp and Conference Association, a collaborative group in which Gill says “we unabashedly steal programs from each other” — learning from what others have tried.
“He is a visionary kind of person,” said Karen Akin, associate pastor of Second Presbyterian Church in Little Rock and a member of the Ferncliff board of directors. “He has a great heart for ministry. And he has helped bring the concepts together of a camping atmosphere, a place of re-creation, if you will, with the idea of mission.”
Children and violence
On March 24, 1998, two teenage boys — Andrew Golden, 11, and Mitchell Johnson, 13 — showed up at their school, Westside Middle School in Jonesboro, Ark., with guns. While Golden set off the fire alarm, Johnson waited in the nearby woods. When students and teachers emerged from the school in response to the alarm, the boys opened fire. Four girls and a teacher were killed; others were wounded.
That next summer, Ferncliff held a free camp for about 70 young people affected by the shooting, working through the local ministerial alliance to build connections with the community.
At first, people from Jonesboro were skeptical, Gill said. “After a tragedy like that, after the media leaves, the community just wants to close ranks. It takes a lot of work to show them that your offer comes from a credible source and is in their best interest.”
Ferncliff worked with Presbyterian Disaster Assistance to make contact with professionals with expertise in dealing with post-traumatic stress, and tried to create an environment of both fun and of healing.
The idea was that “getting kids close to nature, building community, worship, sharing meals, using art — all those things are healing,” Gill said. “These kids didn’t want to come to therapy camp. They wanted to have fun. You figure the healing could come in the back door. They needed to get away from where they were and have a place where they could be safe and talk to each other.”
The camp went well, and relationships began to be built. Some of the students had no connection with a church — but they were willing to come to a church camp.
“We told them that God’s love doesn’t leave with the media, and we won’t either,” Gill said. He stayed in touch with some of the Westside students, went to their graduations.
And the school camp wasn’t a one-shot thing.
On April 20, 1999, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold went to their school, Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo., armed with bombs and guns. They shattered the serenity of a school, killing 12 students and a teacher, wounding 24 others.
In February 2000, the winter after the Columbine massacre, Ferncliff took students from Jonesboro and from another shooting incident in Conyers, Ga., to Colorado to meet with students from Columbine, gathering at a Presbyterian church. The next summer, students from Columbine were invited to summer camp at Ferncliff.
Then Church World Service decided to bring some children from Bosnia and from other places where violence was entrenched.
“We realize how healing it is to have kids talking to other kids who’ve been through the same thing,” Gill said.
A camp’s mission
All of that got folks at Ferncliff thinking about how a camp in the hills of Arkansas could be a refuge for people — and a place of mission.
More camps were started, for children who had had a parent who was incarcerated, for kids whose families had been homeless.
“It just made us realize there’s a huge population that needs this,” Gill said. “That chapter just made us a better camp. We figured if we can do that for those kids, why couldn’t we be more intentional about all our camps? All of us have areas where we need healing.”
And the presbytery, he said, began to think of Ferncliff as a place of mission — not just a place to roast marshmallows, Gill said, but of “meeting people’s needs wherever they are. … It bumped us up a notch.”
At Ferncliff, the traditional summer camp program has grown an average of 3 percent a year — and every year, something new is added, something old let go.
A big hit among the new offerings: the Magic Mystery Tour camp. Each day, the campers get up and are loaded into vans. They have no idea of what lies ahead — anything from miniature golf to walking a labyrinth to serving food to the homeless.
“Half the fun for the kids is they don’t know what’s next,” Gill said.
As a camp and conference center in a state with lots of small congregations, Ferncliff began holding confirmation retreats, bringing together teenagers from churches all over the area for a weekend. The students form small groups, with each becoming a new church of sorts for the weekend — writing mission statements, drawing and designing their churches to present to the rest of the students.
The teenagers began to describe what they wanted a church — their church — to be like. “So many of these kids designed mission into their church,” Gill said. They created churches with soup kitchens and bloodmobiles and day care centers and tutoring programs, all inside their church.
“Time after time, their churches had under their roofs something about helping people,” Gill said.
Disaster relief
That made the leaders of Ferncliff think even more deeply about what a camp and a conference center could do to be of service, not only to Presbyterians but to the community and the world.
Drawing on the connections that Ferncliff had built with Presbyterian Disaster Assistance in its years of working with victims of violence, Gill began to consider what role the camp might play in disaster relief work.
He knew that Church World Service had a warehouse in Maryland where it stored Gift of the Heart kits that were sent to help victims of disasters. So Gill wrote to Presbyterian Disaster Assistance, saying, “We have space and we have volunteers,” and asking if the agency had ever considered building a warehouse of its own.
He also wrote a proposal for a Birthday Offering grant from Presbyterian Women, floating the same concept — to build a warehouse in cooperation with Presbyterian Disaster Assistance and Church World Service. To Gill’s surprise, the proposal was accepted. With funding from Presbyterian Women and Presbyterian Disaster Assistance, a warehouse was completed in June 2006.
Children who come camping at Ferncliff now assemble Gift of the Heart kits as part of their experience — taking a hayride to the warehouse, learning about Presbyterian relief work, pitching in to make kits.
That has led Gill to some interesting adventures — hunting on ebay for things like soap, toothpaste and nail clippers at bargain prices. “Last week I got 17 pounds of Band-aids for $8,” he said with pride.
Ferncliff also has become involved with the rebuilding following Hurricane Katrina. Presbyterian Disaster Assistance has opened an office there through which teams going to PDA’s Volunteer Villages in the Gulf Coast are coordinated. Arkansas is probably a day’s drive from areas in the southern U.S. prone to flooding, hurricanes, and tornados, so a mobile Volunteer Village will be stored in the warehouse, ready to be sent where needed.
“When you go to Ferncliff,” Akin said, “you feel like you’re part of something larger than yourself.”
There are still challenges — particularly to build up weekday occupancy of the conference center. About half the groups that use the conference center aren’t Presbyterian — many come from other churches or nonprofit groups. About 20 percent of Presbyterian camps and conference centers are growing, Gill said; another 20 percent are “hanging on by their fingernails,” and about 60 percent are making do.
Maggie Thannish, 12, likes traditional camp fun — hiking, fishing, canoeing, campfires at night. But she also likes the air conditioning in the new cabins — part of a $2 million renovation.
Ellie Johnston, now a high school senior, first came to Ferncliff when she was seven.
“It surrounds a lake that has mountains around it,” Johnston said. “The mountains are Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. The only one I’ve ever hiked up is Luke, and you can see everything. It’s wonderful when the sun rises and there’s a lake. They have sort of an outdoor sanctuary around a fire. … Being in the Bible Belt, Presbyterians are usually the minority. It’s really nice to be among people who have the same beliefs that you do, and are willing to talk about your beliefs.”
At Ferncliff, “you can always get a hug,” Johnston said.
“I wish everyone could go to Ferncliff.”
