Overview
1. Genuine Community
- Camp contrasts with the familiar. Labels, expectations of others, mindless daily routines, influences of parents, teachers, peers, colleagues, media, and friends are all left behind in favor of a special temporary community with focused purpose: presenting Christ and nurturing those in the faith toward maturity and Christian leadership. It uses the entire camp community of people and environment to accomplish this purpose.
- Campers are immersed in a contrasting Christ-centered, loving community free to embrace the values and lifestyle of that community. A Christian camp can be a clear model demonstrating how Christians should live.
- Camp is a place to try new things, meet new people, and have new adventures. The “newism” works wonders in that it opens campers to change in many ways and, most significantly, spiritually.
2. Whole-Person Ministry
- Camp is designed to minister to the whole person.
- Camp immerses us in His creation.
- The activities at camp also provide many opportunities to teach spiritual truths.
- Camp engages the mind. The stimulation of a new environment, unfamiliar people, different activities, changed schedule, all facilitate mental growth. Camp powerfully communicates spiritual truths and spurs spiritual growth among campers—in the midst of God’s creation.
3. Relationship Building
- Camp is foremost a highly relational experience. At camp, spiritual mentors are always present. They are visual examples of how to live when tired, how to be kind when others are unkind, how to control anger, how to discipline with love, how to ask for forgiveness, how to grow spiritually, how to deal with temptation, and how to live in a community. Christ is held as the most significant relationship to cultivate, and the relationship that brings meaning and healing to all other relationships.
- Youth campers often return home talking about their counselors and what they did with their new friends. Counselors are their heroes, models, and friends.
4. Memory Making
- Camp is a contrast to every day life, and because this contrast causes the camper’s senses to be heightened, time takes on new meaning. Campers live more in the psychological present. Events at camp become more engaging, alive, vivid; they are filled with energy and totally absorb campers. Because most camp experiences are beyond the traditional and familiar, they also provide moments that render campers ready for learning.
- The product of heightened senses, total engagement, and readiness to learn—combined with spiritual truths attached to these memory-making experiences—equals life-shaping memories.
- Camp is a distinct and intense experience that will forever stand out from other life experiences in one’s memory. It offers the opportunity to attach spiritual truths to memory-making experiences. After they have long since returned home, when memories of camp return, campers also remember the spiritual truths and are moved to respond to those truths.
5. Leadership Development
- Camps are ideal nurturing environments for developing leaders for church and society.
- Where else are young people given the opportunity for leadership development? To build leadership skills, people must be given responsibility for others and be mentored in the process of ministering and leading.
- It’s a chance to discover God in a deeper way, and to see His faithfulness to His promises realized in tough situations.
- A survey commissioned by CCCA noted that more than half the people in full-time Christian ministry today had made life-changing decisions at camp. Many not only gave their lives to Jesus Christ at camp, but they learned their leadership/ministry skills there as well.
Highlights from Focus Series, Values of Christian Camping. Published by Christian Camps and Conference Association (CCCA).