Resistance Is Necessary

Later this week, I will attend the 50th reunion of a camp I attended in New Hampshire. These people are the best people I know — the essence of liberal (aka “Jesus-based” rather than doctrine-based) Christianity which the world needs more than ever. They bring joy to the people around them, they lead lives worthy of followers of Jesus,they are spiritual, and they live all over the place. When we get together once a year or so, it’s phenomenal, fun, and life-sustaining. Who wouldn’t want to be a part of that?

We will never know because that camp closed down 36 years ago. It has had new owners who put up awesome new things on the campus like zip lines and they seem to make it work.

And yet, I know of a bunch of camps in Rhode Island, Massachusetts, New York, Maine in mainstream churches that struggle to keep their doors open. Apparently the camps are expensive to run. Apparently insurance is an issue. Apparently weather is an issue. Apparently being “rustic” doesn’t appeal to kids these days. Kids would rather connect with each other via video games or online games or whatever….. BLAH, BLAH, BLAH

If fundamentalists can make it work, why can’t we? There is an excellent camp in Connecticut called Silver Lake and — while it struggles financially at times — it does the kind of things that Christian camps are supposed to do:

Get you closer to God.

Get you closer to your neighbor.

Connect to creation.

Learn and live in the way Jesus taught us to.

Give you the Spirit to make you want to change the world.

And… raise up new leaders for the church.

When Jesus said, “Love God with all your heart and soul and strength and mind and love your neighbor as yourself”, he wasn’t kidding. Camps have been the ways we do that — at least in New England, at least in the past. What changed? Many denominations have stopped putting their energy into them. Those denominations don’t know what they have had.

I am in no way saying the church shouldn’t try something new. There are all kinds of ways forward that simply hadn’t occurred to us older folk, and I long to see them come into being/fruition because God’s name and Jesus’ way need to be praised, enacted, practiced, and appreciated in whatever ways we can. Camps, however, shouldn’t be left out of those possibilities.

Here’s why:

Camps also serve as Conference Centers, as Retreats, as Spiritual Centers and meditative spaces.

People need to get close to nature and its rhythms. While I am all for imagination and the possibilities of the future, we also need to understand the limits of life and — by contrast — our own power to make change. AI may create an imaginary wall in less than a second. Building a real wall, or a real building, creating clothes, or making a quilt, fixing plumbing or doing electrical work all require time, and hard work. A short-attention span is not a good thing, and making it shorter is the point of companies trying to sell us things, not the rock being chiseled by drops of water that becomes the Grand Canyon.

Gravity still works in nature, even if it doesn’t on your game. A rock is still hard. Wood is still beautiful. God speaks to us of things that take time, that deepen with age, and are immutable, and have a different rhythm through nature. None of that seems important to people who are young, but that’s ok, because it will be important as they go through life.

People still need people. They still need human contact. They still need touch. They need to learn that people can work out their differences, that people can and will be different and still get along, that people are multi-dimensional and you don’t have to like all the parts to appreciate the whole.

People also need time that they are not being advertised to, asked for money, or getting behavioral compliments every five seconds (did you ever notice how often you’re told “excellent” or “good” or “amazing” when playing Bejeweled, for instance? You shouldn’t need that.). People shouldn’t get points for blowing things up or killing people.

All of these things — time to listen to each other and God — time to realize that time exists and that we live within it, that we are mortal and can make decisions about how to live with each other — all of these things can happen in a few buildings in the woods, with people that love, and teach, listen and learn. God can be found in the midst of all of them at church camps like we used to have, without wi-fi and phones.

It only takes a spark to get a fire burning….

Resisting with Peace,

John

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