"Church Camp", by Cara Meredith

A Book Review

I have just finished this most excellent book. Even though the topic is about church camps, the book actually tackles issues pertaining to the broader evangelical church culture, so I would highly recommend it. It is full of golden nuggets and very valuable insights. Cara Meredith was a camp director for decades and speaks from experience.

As usual, I will list my takeaways:

• Camp Can Be Good

  Church camp can be an incredibly enjoyable and positive experience. I would support that statement. My five kids have all attended church camps all over the world, and the camps they attended varied greatly. My kids enjoyed a particular camp they attended in Switzerland, for example. It is no surprise to me that the further removed a camp is from American culture, the less toxic it is. But I know that camp can be enjoyable anywhere, as long as it is run in a healthy way, which, of course, is totally possible.

• Numbers are Down

  One glaring reality is that church camps are on the wane. Numbers are down, which is not surprising, considering how many families are exiting churches right now.

• The Transactional Nature of Camp

  Unfortunately, the goal of many camps is conversion, getting the kids saved. It is transactional in nature and therefore very focused on that one thing. I have heard camp directors and ministers boast of how many kids become Christians after camp. Of course, nothing wrong with kids wanting to follow Jesus, but the focus on camp being the place of conversion adds a lot of pressure to what should be a week of spirituality and enjoyment.

  “We did this instead of simply loving young people, no strings attached.” (p.22)

  Of course, this could be said of most interactions in churches. The goal of relationships is all too often conversion.

• The Focus on Individual Conversion

  Just like in evangelical culture in general, the kids are groomed at a tender age towards a personal conversion. It follows the individualistic pattern of protestant and evangelical churches.

  “As much as individualism is celebrated in American culture, it is perhaps even more celebrated within certain religious cultures, including at white evangelical church camps.” (p.19)

  “With the overpersonalization of salvation in white evangelicalism, the whole exchange has become more of a transaction and has generally been preoccupied with the afterlife and escaping hell.” (p.140)

  For more on this topic, refer to my recent post, “Personal or Community Conversion?”.

• Shame and Fear

  At a very tender and vulnerable age, young people are bombarded with teachings steeped in fear: “Halfway through the week, sin became a trump card to evangelical belief systems, a scare tactic often used to frighten kids into making the only right choice.” (p.84) Young people are scared with age-inappropriate teaching about sin and the cross. “Far from feeling like a beloved child of God, campers instead left feeling the weight of the human condition, which was, of course, the entire point.” One of my children came back from camp in tears, begging to be baptized at the age of 12, so that she could reach out to her friends and they wouldn’t go to hell. Wrong motivation!

  Kids are made to feel worthless and the worst of sinners at an age when they are not mature enough to process this. The long-term harm is felt for decades. I spoke to a young man in his thirties who told me he had felt guilty his whole life, and it started when he was exposed to intense teaching about sin, the cross, and the lostness of the world when he was much too young.

  “But for the psychologists and therapists among us, hearing such messages about God, self, and others can be a form of complex spiritual trauma. Just as complex trauma is repeated and prolonged (which is the case for campers who hear this message, year after year, or for those who go home to churches that regurgitate such beliefs), practices, or structures that overwhelm an individual’s ability to cope and return to a sense of safety.” (p.90) WOW!!! This is hard-hitting. The loss of safety is terrible. Cara Meredith writes a lot more about this. The book is worth reading. This is not just about camp!

  “I don’t doubt the impact of hearing how you’re just another dirty rotten little sinner, sometimes over and over again, very well may have resulted in eventual feelings of guilt and shame and unworthiness for some of the campers who swallowed the message hook, line, and sinker.” (p.91) From my own observation, the child does not have to be told face to face; they can get that from the messages alone. I have also noticed that the more sensitive young people, the more intelligent ones, the “gifted” kids, tend to feel this even more. I speak with them now that they are adults, and the damage is real.

  There are better ways to introduce kids to Jesus and to motivate them. A gory rendition of the cross is not the most effective or appropriate way to do so. It is very confusing for young people to hear about God’s love, but at the same time be exposed to a violent description of the crucifixion. “On the one hand (or in the case of camp, on the one day), campers receive a message of unending, abounding love: God loves you more than anything else. Then the script is flipped: But God believes you are dirty and worthless, a sinner in every sense of the word. A day (or in some cases, a half a day later), a solution to the contradictive but emerges through a “God who can only effect the salvation of sinners through an act of violent retribution”… “Harsh chords of cognitive dissonance begin to play their haunting tune when campers are forced to wrestle with these realities, both of what this great and perfect deity supposedly believes about them and also of what this means they should believe about themselves.” (p.88)

  Of course, this does not only affect campers and teenagers. Many adults struggle with the same thing. I look back at all the years I taught this, and I now understand the discomfort I myself felt. As someone who taught about grace but led with legalism, I myself was scared of not measuring up, even as recently as 2019. “Penal substitutionary atonement, an atonement theory widely embraced by a number of conservatives, mostly within the Reformed tradition, is damaging children and youth at record numbers.” (p.86) “Although the theory tends to work in the short term, the outdated model ends up doing more harm than good. Record numbers of former campers are leaving the faith, report low self-esteem, and continue to unpack the harmful theology long into adulthood.” (p.87) Yes, I can testify to that!

• Forced Conversions

  At the end of all this, “As a thirteen-year-old kid, the only thing I could do was say ‘yes’ because, of course, I’d say yes: I thought I’d killed Jesus. I had to say ‘yes”.

• God as Male

  “God is neither male nor female but is instead revealed as being, Spirit, and imaged in both male and female. But when God is only identified as male in church camp settings, then boys and girls—not to mention non-binary children who identify as neither male nor female—can easily walk away with the belief that God is a bigger fan of boys than girls.” (p.51)

• Purity Culture

  Camp is notorious for enforcing purity culture. Purity culture is based on fear and unreasonable man-made rules. “Young men were taught their minds were evil, whereas young women came to believe their bodies were evil… Whether campers or staff members, the onus for young girls and women to protect their “brothers in Christ” lay entirely on them.” I was told of an incident where a camp leader taught a lesson on masturbation to a group of preteen boys and asked them to raise their hands if they were guilty of such “crime”. Fortunately, a more mature leader witnessed this and pulled the camp leader aside to tell him in no uncertain terms how inappropriate that message was.

• Lack of Inclusivity

  Church camp is dominated by white culture, even if the composition of the camps is diverse. Minority kids do not always have a place. Just like in churches, white culture is the dominant culture, and everyone has to fit in.

• Camp Properties Cost Money

  Just like a church building, camp sites are expensive and drain resources. I remember when the churches in our particular world sector were “taxed” to pay for a camp we had no connection to. It was a pet project of the leader, and much money was sunk into that.

This excellent book is not so much about camp, even though the observations revolve around camp culture. But camp culture is really church culture. Reading this book connected so many dots for me, especially when the author explains the impact of the way we present the Gospel to young people. I speak daily with young people who grew up in church, and the trauma they are now experiencing in their 20s, 30s, and even 40s, reflects the words of this book.

Camp could be an amazing experience, and maybe sometimes it is when it is done without an agenda in a non-transactional way. What an amazing opportunity to introduce young people to Jesus in a gentle and age-appropriate way!