The following piece was written by our very own Pastor Becca, one of our summer camp chaplains in 2021, 2022. Her reflections below represent the intersection of her experience as a Presbyterian Pastor and as a Summer Camp Mom. She will be returning this summer for summer camp at Johnsonburg in 2023 and we are grateful for her kind words about our program.
It is late July, and the air is thick with humidity. It’s only 8:00 a.m., and I feel as if I need gills to breathe as I walk from the cafeteria to the chapel at Camp Johnsonburg in New Jersey. We gather on the grass and passionate young adult employees begin to play guitars and sing. The staff and the seasoned campers sing boldly and begin going through the hand motions that accompany the camp songs.
Among the campers is my own teenage daughter, a pastor’s kid, who spends time at church begrudgingly. At home, church is boring. She doesn’t sing; she doesn’t say the prayers or the creeds, even though she has known them for years. However, camp is her home; it is the only place she openly talks about God.
Today, she begins her third week of summer camp, and I am there for the first time that summer as a volunteer chaplain. As I am singing and learning new motions I look up and there is my daughter singing loudly, teaching her cabinmates the motions to go along with the songs. Her face is lifted to the sky. She is worshiping, and I turn away because the tears in my eyes come with no notice. My voice gets stuck in my throat, my pastor-mom heart bursting with joy.
I take in all the campers from elementary school – high school, the staff, most of whom are college students – and my heart continues to swell with joy. What is happening here seems miraculous: so many young adults and youth are excited to worship.
A year has passed since this memory, and I still think about it often. It’s one of many times that I’ve felt the Spirit at work at camp. This summer will be my third where I volunteer a week as a camp chaplain. During those weeks I get to know and am blessed by the campers and the staff. I listen and walk with young adults that love camp and love Jesus but are disenchanted with the church. They long for deep theological conversation, not cut-and-dry answers. At camp, all are welcome, exactly as they are.
After my time at camp each year, I leave sad for these younger generations, including my own child, because most have no church home to return to where they can worship as they fully are. Yes, many go to churches that have vibrant youth groups or young adult ministries. Yet there is always a tension between the energy and unconventional ideas that come from those coming of age and the tradition that has a strong hold upon us.
[Camp] is a microcosm of the church we are called to be! Then all that energy heads back into the world and it has nowhere to go.
My own child comes home to a church that loves her but the next youngest person in church is her 40-something mother. We made an agreement that I will dance with her off to the side in church every time we sing a camp song, but I’m hardly a replacement for a community of peers. I love my congregation. They are good human beings, and I am blessed to serve with them. Yet, they are limited in what they can offer my teen.
This breaks my heart into a million pieces. What happens at Camp Johnsonburg and many Christian camps around our country each summer is a real and tangible experience of living in a Spirit-infused community. Hundreds of young people are empowered to worship on their own terms, to ask hard questions, to learn to lead, to push themselves outside of their comfort zones, to build relationships with peers who are unlike them. This is a microcosm of the church we are called to be! Then all that energy heads back into the world and it has nowhere to go.
As a church leader, I constantly hear about how we need to find young people who are willing to be a part of our communities of faith. We need younger people to take on leadership roles. This is absolutely true! Yet, so often when younger folks step up with fresh ideas, I see them get shot down before they ever have a chance to fly. The parents of squirmy children get “the look” from one person and they never want to come back. The teens get boisterous in worship and a meeting is called for how to deal with such disrespect. Children are limited from partaking at the communion table in some churches. Our children, teens and young adults are living in a world that is vastly different than the world I knew growing up. It might as well be a different world entirely from the generations beyond my own. Yet, when they show up, we ask them to be just like us. This isn’t working.
As a parent who is a pastor, I have felt this tension. My daughter was skipped in the serving of communion. She was chastised for taking off her shoes. Currently, she will sit in church if she helps lead worship, but typically, she lays outside the side door to the sanctuary sprawled out drawing lest her movement is a distraction. I can tell in our conversations that she listens, but she doesn’t feel that Sunday morning is a place where she can be herself. Once she sang (a camp song) and prayed in worship, and I received negative feedback about the music selection.
We are losing generations because we aren’t willing to compromise, to listen, to empower, to let go of the past and make way for a yet unknown future.
I wish I had the answer for how to take the energy of camp and connect it to our aging congregations. I do not. I do know we are missing a powerful opportunity to raise leaders in the church by not listening to them and clinging to what we have always known. Church is not about me, or you, it is about the beloved community coming together to worship and serve.
This is especially true in the PC(USA) where we pride ourselves on being able to worship together despite our differences. We are losing generations because we aren’t willing to compromise, to listen, to empower, to let go of the past and make way for a yet unknown future. I am grateful for the experience camp gives to our younger generations and I abide in hope that we as a church will take that energy and empower it.
This piece was written by her and originally published as “What can Christian summer camps tell us about the needs of the church?” in the Presbyterian Outlook. Link: Article.