It stands to reason that the person seen as the legendary pioneer among the camp and conference crowd would have been an inventor from the start.
This spring, Dale Brubaker will mark his 94th birthday, the 65th anniversary of his ordination and the 30th anniversary of his retirement. He also can mark the 62nd anniversary of his invention of the drive-in church.
And you thought Robert Schuller came up with that idea.
Brubaker was serving a little country church in Waltham Township, Ill. The adjacent eight acres of land prompted frequent session discussions on who was going to mow the lawn. One evening while looking over the field, contemplating the newly burgeoning business of drive-in theaters, a picture flashed in his mind. He asked his wife Katie what she saw. “It’s dark and it’s a field,” she replied.
“I didn’t dare share with her my dumb idea,” he told me laughingly in a recent conversation.
He got on the phone, one of those party-line phones, and invited six farmers in the church to come over to the house. “I knew these farmers well. I thought they’d think it was ‘yeah right, dumb, forget it.’” Still, he told them his idea for “drive-in vespers.”
They looked around and said, “Let’s do it.”
They couldn’t set up individual car speakers, but they could spread around large sound speakers. Before long they were hosting 400-500 worshippers a Sunday. They kept those services going for 15 years.
In 1956 Brubaker was invited to join the synod’s camps and conference committee. In one of the first meetings, someone pondered out loud the possibility of forming a national network of camp leaders to share ideas and experiences on an ongoing basis. They latched onto the then-upcoming 50-year anniversary celebration of Camp Kosciuisko in Winona Lake, Ind., (founded in 1908), which grew out of the revivals led by evangelist Billy Sunday. The others asked Dale to keynote the event. In the process they launched what would be dubbed the Presbyterian Church Camp and Conference Association (PCCCA).
Both the association in general and Brubaker in particular would make innovation their byline.
First, he launched the idea of mission tours. Then music and drama caravans. As the space program developed they started “Canaveral Conversations” in a Florida camp, focusing on the relationship of faith and science. “John Glenn was very gracious” as were other early participating astronauts like Ed White. David Brinkley of ABC News heard about it and did a feature on them. That generated other similar conversation gatherings in Los Alamos, at the Seattle World’s Fair — 12 locations in all. They even organized some of the first international Christian youth gatherings.
In the early 1960s, Brubaker also helped Illinois Presbyterians establish the Stronghold Camp and Retreat. Since 1928, the site had been the summer home of Walter Strong, the owner and publisher of the Chicago Daily News, and included a castle built to compete with the one erected by rival William Randolph Hearst in California. Amid the other buildings, camp leaders later built a multipurpose facility, naming it — to the evident discomfort of Dale and Katie — the Brubaker Center.
At his advanced age, Brubaker still swells with passion and vision for camp and conference center ministry. He’s jealous to protect Ghost Ranch in New Mexico from the possibility of squandering its awesome beauty — and to fight efforts by Albuquerque to seize its water rights. He is also committed to helping Montlure Presbyterian Church Camp rebuild three cabins and plant new trees that were destroyed by the devastating 2011
Wallow Fire.
When asked why he has invested so much energy, intelligence, imagination and love into camp and conference center ministries, his response is immediate and enthusiastic. “It’s our best evangelistic tool.” He elaborates: “I don’t know whether it’s the surroundings or it’s the community that forms among young people of all different persuasions, ethnic groups, and all that, but there’s something about that community and God’s unfolding, eternal love that seems to enfold the young people.”
This camping pioneer apparently figured out long ago that the key to innovation is to watch where and how the master inventor is working and to follow that lead.
