Peter Surgenor, 59, is a Presbyterian minister who’s just been elected to a three-year term as president of the American Camp Association. He’s executive director of the Holmes Presbyterian Camp & Conference Center in upstate New York, which is run by the presbyteries of Hudson River, Long Island, and New York City.
And he’s a man who can trace the history of church camps from the time when volunteers did most of the work and donated most of the food to keep costs down, to an era when camps have become accustomed to multiple streams of income.
“The fact that I’m a Presbyterian minister doesn’t make a big difference” to the ACA, Surgenor said in a telephone interview. “I’m seen there as a person who loves and has grown up in camps” — having made camping ministry the focus of his professional career almost from the beginning.
But “I am part of an important stream of the ACA,” that of faith-based camps, he said. The ACA includes a broad membership, including camps affiliated with religious traditions, with the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts, with the YMCA and Camp Fire USA, as well as independent camps. The American Camp Association will celebrate its 100th anniversary in 2010.
Its focus is on human development rather than faith formation, Surgenor said, although he sees connections, and feels that the resources of the ACA have contributed to his growth as the director of a Presbyterian camp.
Going to sleepover camp helps children gain independence and conquer homesickness, which can be a “growing-up piece of living away from mom and dad” that will help make the transition easier as they leave home after high school, he said.
Often, faith-based camps “design their programs around the changes they expect to happen,” Surgenor said. So they put the campers into small groups, and give them intentional experiences to open their eyes to the power of nature and to talk about God’s presence in the world.
They learn to build relationships with adults who aren’t their parents. They learn to speak up, and to allow others’ voices to be heard, to make friends with people from different places and backgrounds.
The populations that Presbyterian camps serve can vary, he said. Some attract youth from churches across a particular presbytery; others see their mission more as serving underprivileged children, whether from church families or not.
At Holmes, “we have not been building a program that was designed to have professions of faith on Fridays, the last day of camp,” Surgenor said.
But they have been “very clear about giving folks the building blocks of faith, so when the time comes at home or at camp sometime later for a decision about faith, they have a much richer place to make that decision from.”
