One Good Reason to Send Your Teenager to Summer Camp
In the circles of the church I serve some parents are suspicious of youth ministries, reluctant to send their children to summer camp, mainly because of their childhood escapades and the trite nature of some youth programs. This suspicion is shared by some of my ministerial colleagues, who assign all youth ministry to the sphere of the family. For the past eight years, I have participated in hosting in the Pacific Northwest the youth camps of Reformed Youth Ministries. Each year we have offered a ratio of 1:4 to 1:6 (camper:staff) highlighting solid biblical and theological training mixed with fun recreation and enriching interaction, not to mention daily worship and prayer.
One of our counselors (a pastor) at our 2010 summer camp shared with me one good reason to send our youth to camp. He wrote:
“Friday night, the last night of camp, I finally got my room of campers quiet and in their bunks at about 12:30. They kept quiet for about 10 minutes. Then, assuming that I was asleep, they began whispering. Their whispers grew to audible conversation.
One camper was confronting another camper on some issues, sharing how he had been holding quite a bit of bitterness against him. He began sharing his own spiritual dryness and deadness. One of the guys confessed that he hadn’t been listening all week in any of the chapel sessions and that he hadn’t truly prayed in years. More than one camper began confessing their sins and sharing how they were unfortunately failing in all the typical areas of temptation. Some of them began giving mainly bad advice on how to stand up for themselves against bullies and how to succeed in guy/girl relationships. But other voices in the dark cabin began bringing Christ into the conversation. Some of these guys were directly quoting lines they had heard from E. C. that week or from their seminars and were using these lessons effectively, urging their brothers in the bunks to remember the love of God, to run from their sin, to flee to Christ.
I was amazed at this whole conversation because when I was in high school, my buddies and I would have confined our talk to things deemed safe, sarcastic and saucy. Last Friday night was one of the few times in my life that I’ve heard teenage boys cry. Some of these tears were shed by guys who work hard at making us believe they are tough. I have forgotten how fragile people really are, how much even the tough guy needs an arm around his shoulder and some basic words of love like, “I’m really glad you are here at this camp.” Because otherwise on the inside he is meditating on the cruel words he received from his father or his brother or the kid at school who hates his guts.
I began thinking that I was not just eavesdropping on a group of young men at summer camp. I was eavesdropping on the current and future church. If you speakers and youth leaders had not been pouring yourselves and Christ’s gospel into these men, prior to camp and during camp, how likely would it have been that the gospel would have emerged so beautifully in an otherwise ugly conversation? Every time you teach and equip an adolescent, you are teaching a very strategic person. He or she may end up being the strategic evangelist to speak to his peers when his peers finally start talking in the middle of the night.
I now believe in summer camp more than ever. Teenage boys (or adults for that matter) are simply not going to have these types of conversations in the 20 minutes after Sunday worship service, holding a cup of questionable church coffee, with their parents twenty feet away.