The Best Money The Church Ever Spent

It’s almost March and it’s getting to be that time when people in churches start thinking about summer camps and I, for one, want to support them. They are, by far the best money the church ever spent because the tangible buys access to the intangible. I’m not exactly sure how it happens, but over and over and over again, I have seen lives transformed forever because of a week at camp with a Christian them. What I am sure about is that Holy Spirit is at work in the combination of time away from “civilization”, time away from “real life”, time with a community and  time with a decidedly Christian intent.

In my time, I have seen and\or worked at Deering in New Hampshire (where my life was changed), Silver Lake and Camp Wightman in Connecticut, Warner Farm and Bement  in Massachusetts, and Skye Farm in Upstate New York. I have been a camper, an advisor, staff, and Dean and — in each case I have seen people learn about Christianity in the best way possible — via experience. For those “not from here”, none of my camps have ever had a day where you “Come to The Loooordddd!” are baptized and\or “saved” publicly. That kind of thing is about theology, about what you think. I know people who have been, but this is not that. You can argue about what people think and whether it’s right or wrong. You can’t argue about experience. The kinds of camps I am talking about offer experience of God in ways that no form of intellectual Christian Education could ever match.  That part is hard to explain.

Now, as far as I’m concerned, any camping experience is a good one.  Aside from the mosquitoes, time away from The World is great. No news, no loud noises, no arguments, no pollution to speak of, no phones or computers — no extra stimulus of any kind. It’s just you and nature and whatever else you bring with you.  Well, OK, the large drunken family two sites down with every piece of technology at top volume can ruin your time out there, but they’re not supposed to.  To the extent that time camping doesn’t include them, any time away can be a transformational experience.  The ability to hear yourself think, to not have the crush of an agenda or schedule is an experience we don’t get very often in modern society. Quakers do it as often as they go to worship, but they are an unusual sect.

It also doesn’t hurt that the places I’ve listed  are all in beautiful country in the middle of forests or woods. The hills of New Hampshire are by far the most gorgeous to me, but each of the camps I have mentioned has it’s own peak time — summer or early fall — when it is especially nice. If you’re one of those people who like nature, Christian camps generally offer that, as well.  That is one part of what makes these places life-changing, but it is only one part. And that may be why camps are so expensive to own — because of the views and the cost of the land that goes with those views.  I don’t know, but it is one part of the magic.

Sitting around thinking about the Bible or praying is also a good thing that can transform a  life. These things happen at each of the camps I mentioned. Usually, they are a part of morning worship or evening vespers put on by the people that attend that session. For instance, the 4th grade staff and campers might do worship one day and the 9th grade campers might put on worship another day, with less ministerial-type help. The thing is, that, for once,  worship actually comes from the people involved.  It says what they want it to say. Faith is expressed in ways that mean something to the kids, then the teens. Original songs appear, people who never thought anyone would listen are suddenly talking, people who never thought about worship are suddenly leading it.  In many churches, the kids and teens are shuffled off to Sunday School, so they have no experience of worship except for Christmas and Easter.  For others who do see it in church, it’s that boring thing that the old people do.  But here, at camp, expression of religion takes root.  People actually experience and express the Spirit for the first time.  This is a part of the magic of Christian camp that secular or regular camp misses.  Anytime in life people can come across the Holy Spirit, it’s a good day and it happens daily there.

What happens when the Spirit moves, you are able to feel and hear it, and you are surrounded by beauty? You find the beauty in yourself. That is the beginning of the transformation that camp allows for. But wait, there’s more!!! What happens next is the final thing that happens to change the world– community is created and imagination becomes experience.  For some of us, not-even-imagined reality becomes experience.

When I arrived at Deering for the first time at age 14, I was a city kid in the midst of depressing times that my family had come to accept as normal.  I was geeky and depressed and not all that into hygiene.  This either made me the brunt of  people at school’s jokes or was a response to them. Jr. High had been hell, and I didn’t expect anything more from High School.  And yet, somehow, Bob Kyte, our youth minister convinced my mother that I could go to camp because I was somehow going to be important.  What he didn’t mention was that, in his eyes, everyone was important. And that was the where the transformation started. Deering was a 6-day-long camp and, for the first 3, I felt out of place and strange — not bad, but not all on-board, either. But three days of living in a non-judgmental community began to stir something in me and I began to note something was different in this little world in the New Hampshire hills. About mid-week, I figured out what it was — people assumed I was human and that was all I needed to be to be accepted there!  Why? Because they assumed — and acted like — the Spirit was in me, just as it was in everybody!  What a radical concept!!!!  To this day, I see people’s lives transformed when I simply treat them like human beings and assume that means something to them. How do I do it? It’s easy because I have experienced this little community of 100 people as a teen and it seemed like the real world. Never again would I settle for what school taught about the way the world “had” to be. Never again would I settle for what Bruce Hornsby says, “That’s just the way it is”. In fact, I remember being at peace, almost high, for the first week or so after I got home and being angry when my mother said, “welcome to the real world”.  I knew, on a gut level, that we had choices about how to live, and that the community of Deering Sr. High Camp was just as real, if not more so, as the depressing world my mother knew.  I chose to live like I was worth something, and that others were, too from there on in.

Of course, I didn’t always succeed, but that spirit (or Spirit, if you prefer) and my love for community has always gotten me through. In college, I helped to organize an anti-nuclear power\pro-alternatives group. In seminary, (with absolutely no knowledge of what I was doing, mind you), I started a prayer group that was incredible. In my classes now, I see the class as a community, and tell my students that we’ll all get through this together, because everybody has gifts and the reading might be too much for one person to take in. Over the years, I have led various youth groups, and community has come out of them, as well, leaving me friends for years to come. In fact, for a brief time, I started a small church with friends that impacted my life and (I think) theirs as well. I say this not to brag on myself at all. It doesn’t seem like me that has done these things, but the Holy Spirit working through me, and it has been my pleasure to be a part of each of these communities as well. I have been lucky to be part of them, as much as people tell me they’ve been happy to be a part of the group.

But here’s the thing: this is what I have done with my life and I guess it’s pretty cool.  But I am nowhere near the only one affected by these experiences of Christian camp. If you multiply what I have managed to accomplish by thousands and then make it exponentially stronger, you have the effect on the world that church camps have had. I personally know of “truckloads” of ministers who got ordained after experiences at Deering, Skye Farm, Silver Lake, etc. The former Conference Minister of the Connecticut Conference trumpets her time at Silver Lake as an incredible part of her journey.  For the church’s investment of one week of camp, the church received a lifetime supply of ministry hundreds of times over.

Did I pass the gift on to my Youth Groups and my own children? You bet I did, and I still do. One of the things my wife and I shared when we first met was experiences of church camp, the letdown after coming home, and the hope that someday others would experience what we had known. Has it paid off?  Oh, so very much.  The people that I have sent to Deering came back having a wonderful time as well. And those who didn’t do ministry as a job, use their lives as ministry.  Sometime last year, I wrote a blog piece called “For Friends” and it was this huge list of the accomplishments my cohorts at Deering had accomplished in their years since being there.  I also wrote about Camille Utterback and Gordon Sherman and all the incredible gifts they have given to the world.  Daily, some part of their world is changed because they were changed all those years ago. All for the cost of a week’s tuition at camp.

It is years later, and Deering has faded into UCC history because the denomination thought it couldn’t afford it.  I’m sure that Silver Lake and Sky Farm, and Camp Wightman struggle to this day to keep cabins fixed and usable, and have a director on-site. I’m sure that equipment still costs money and paving, plowing, and plumbing still needs to be dealt with. And I’m sure that denominations and Conferences consider their ministries as something else that “needs” to be cut as they struggle financially. I want to say that this would be a grave error because Church Camp is the best money the church ever spent.  It did and does things on scale that’s hard to imagine.

But, since the denominations are struggling financially, there are other ways to keep this incredible gift alive.

1) If your church has kids that want to go Church Camp, for goodness sakes, send them!  Send as many as you can!

2) If your church has money to give, send donations to the camp that’s near-by or sponsored by your denomination.

3) If you can volunteer there, do so.

4) If they have clean-up days, take your youth group, both to connect them to the place and to help keep it up.  Best friends of mine have gone to Deering reunion weekends and have understood what I meant just by hanging out.

5) And if your denomination thinks about cutting necessary funding (camps don’t need all the latest and most expensive technology, but they do have needs), say no.

With the world’s tangible money, the church’s camps create the intangible — a world that’s better and community of the Spirit. It’s what we do as a church and it’s one of the best ways we do it.

Peace,

John

What If Good News Prevailed?

It’s no surprise to anybody that the world seems to be getting worse. In fact, it seems so bad that many of us (including me on a bad day) think this era might be coming to an end.  For some of us, that means the fall of the American Empire.  For others, natural catastrophes and for some of us, that means Jesus returns. Those of us that take the biblical book of  ”The Revelation to John” seriously think it means both those things — plus gross, disgusting wars, with mayhem and chaos beyond imagination. I like the “Jesus returns” part, but I have a real problem with the whole “death, mayhem, chaos, and blood” part which takes the whole “joy” part out for me.

Still, there’s a part of me that hopes it’s not as bad as all that — that it’s simply a matter of perception — it seems bad because we only see the bad news on TV or in the newspapers or it’s because we have mass media at all. In former times, we didn’t know if there was a war in East Timbuktu or a genocide in the mountains near the Amazon. Now we have mass media, especially CNN, so it seems worse.

I work in a world where evil and its subsequent pain is rampant.  There’s an efficiency to evil — one can destroy a life in events which take next-to-no-time.  A drunk driver runs over a pedestrian in a second, sexual abuse and rape — which mess up people’s lives in so many ways — takes as long as the act itself. An angry word stings for more time than it took to say. An angry sentence can take a lifetime to undo.  Violence can leave people scarred for life.

Good doesn’t seem to have the efficiency behind it. It’s slower and usually far less sensational. It takes longer to heal. It’s quiet  and strong and powerful  in it’s own way. OK, that’s not always true… Tunisia, Egypt, Iran, Libya, …Wisconsin?  Has anybody noticed that democracy is coming through and toppling governments much faster and much cheaper than our weapons brought it to Iraq? Still, this is an extreme period and no one knows how long it will last or how many lives will be better because of it.

Anyway, it seems like it takes a lot more work to make the world decent than it does to destroy it. And it seems like it takes fewer events to mess it up.  Confirmation of this in the psychology world comes from a man named John Gottman who says it takes five positive strokes for every one negative stroke to keep a marriage alive.

Luckily, I think that more good, small events happen by far than mean or evil ones. Unluckily, the seriously bad ones ones make the news.  We cover the one traffic accident, whereas ten million people drove well enough to not have one.  Still, people are polite all the time under all kinds of situations. That’s a good thing.  Then sometimes, it rises to the level of intentional goodness — people helping out the old person walking across the street, people saving others from burning buildings, pastors or congregants holding someone’s hand in the hospital or feeding the homeless or whatever.  Do we — especially those of us who work with trauma or tragedy — know about these small events enough to make a difference? How would we?  Do senior citizens stuck in their apartment worrying about the alleged crime in the streets hear about all the nice people below? How would they?

Well, it turns out that it’s possible now.  The pastor of South Church, George Harris has begun talking about a thing called “salt and light” on the internet.  It can be found at http://saltandlight.crowdmap.com/.  A fuller description of it can be found at George’s own blog: www.pastorgharris.wordpress.com As I understand it, if you go to the salt and light website, you can leave a mark on a map of where a good event happened — from a small, subtle one to a big political one.  Hopefully, there’s a “billion” of them near every church in America. And of course, hopefully there’s a billion more out in the rest of the world.

Maybe it’s not the end of the world. Maybe it’s not even a bad day. Maybe it just looks that way from where your sitting — or standing, rushing, falling, sleeping, etc. But if it seems otherwise, and you need encouragement or a reminder of how good people can be, you can look at this website and get a different perspective.

Peace,

 

John

In any case,

Surprise! People Are Mad! Oops, Wrong People!

My friend Peter Russell posted a note on Facebook re: Wisconsin and the rest of the world (or the rest of the world leading to Wisconsin, I’m not sure which). In his post, he talked about “The ‘R” word” and I, at first, had to think about it.  It’s been so long since anybody used the “R” word, I’d forgotten what it was. The word, in case you’ve forgotten, is “revolution”.  Around the world for the last two weeks, people have been doing it.  And suddenly, in the middle of … (gasp!)… America! people are starting to talk like it, too.

I don’t know the whole story, but what I’ve been able to piece together is that in Wisconsin, the new governor was elected as a fiscal-conservative-union buster. People knew that when they voted for him, and his rhetoric turned to reality and suddenly people went, “Hey! That hurts!” Now, why people voted for a union-buster in the first place makes no sense — especially if that’s not what they wanted.   What’s more surprising to me is that people didn’t remember they could get angry before this. I have been speaking about economic problems and the discrepancy between rich and poor for a long time, and thought about it angrily long before that. My own denomination, which is against injustice everywhere, has never really come to terms with economic injustice — racism, sexism, homophobia, yes, international poverty —  but not American poverty.  Maybe it’s because we have rich White guys in our pews. Maybe because it’s unpopular to be a liberal and pastors don’t need to stir up more trouble.  Or maybe it’s because we just don’t know what to say. If somebody in the UCC wants to argue with me and tell me about a program out there that addresses American poverty and class differences, please do. I’d love to be wrong on this one, but I don’t think I am. If I am, I’d be happy to post a link to it on this blog.

OK, so here’s the answer from the world of psychology:  Most of America’s poor people have been in a depressed state of “learned helplessness”.

“Learned helplessness” is a term best described with an experiment, though I don’t remember who did it.  In the experiment, dogs were put into an open box and shocked. To no one’s surprise, the dog jumped out of the box. Then the experimenter closed the box and the dog tried and failed  to get out. Then the experimenter took the lid off again and gave the dog a shock. Now the dog didn’t even jump. They just sort of whimpered and got depressed and gave up. Humans go through this sort of thing frequently — not with electric shock but with situations and people.  They mostly go through it when they come up against the irrational — people won’t give them a job because they’re a woman, or black, or Hispanic or won’t serve them in a restaurant because they’re gay or are mad at them because they’re men …. usually, though, this irrationality isn’t seen as irrational.  It’s this sort of nebulous, systemic thing that everybody assumes is just normal but the person being hurt. They just feel nuts.

The person who told me yesterday of being charged $5.00 per day for 3 weeks because of bank policies that make no sense to them is suffering from learned helplessness. Banks can do whatever they want, right? Isn’t that how it is? Well, yes, it is. But it’s not how it’s supposed to be. That’s why she’s dizzy and feels crazy. She forgot that it’s not supposed to be that way. She forgot she could be angry about injustice.  It’s been so long since anybody thought it was injustice that she just got depressed.

That’s how it’s been.  Then somebody in a place we’d never thought about — Tunisia, of all places — got angry and threw out the person that set up the rules that oppressed them. They, in essence, jumped out of the box.  After that, it was all over. Egypt was next, then Iran, then Libya, then…. who knows, then… Wisconsin?!  Dogs with learned helplessness need to be shown they can avoid the shock.  People need to know they can do something about their situation.  And once they do,  suddenly they get angry. After awhile, if the situation gets straightened out, they calm down and the cycle starts all over again as people try to take advantage of others. As there’s a lot of injustice all around the world — and in this country — don’t expect people to calm down for a while.

What kept American people in their mental cages?  Among other things, being called “whiners”. Remember when “liberal” became a bad word? and people started talking about “the ‘L’ word? That was in 1980. So, for 31 years in this country, people in this country didn’t really fight against this type of systemic injustice. Greed was good. Not being greedy was “weird”.  Being poor was your fault if you were poor because you didn’t think to get in on the Stock Market and/or didn’t have the money for it. Poor people were just whiners because they hadn’t thought of the greed first. Worrying about others who were poor made you (gasp!) a liberal, and you’d better darn well shut up if you were going to talk like that!

But, you know what? People’s love for greed in themselves runs out after awhile. Only the  true sociopaths (Hi, Mr. Madoff!) can be that evil.  And the more people that couldn’t keep up with the greed game, the more people got put “under the bus”.  After awhile, nearly everybody’s under the bus — seniors can’t retire, young people can’t go to school, people in the middle can’t afford a car or a house — that’s the events of two years ago — the so-called Great Recession — The system got sooooooooooo out of whack that it couldn’t work anymore. About 15 years ago, the poor started getting depressed. Then they got soooooooo depressed they couldn’t remember why they were depressed or that things could be any other way. That was under Clinton who said “If  folks just work harder for the system, we can be great again”.  Then came Bush, and Clinton’s lie became Bush’s Really Big Lie: “If we give all of our money to the rich, we’ll all be rich”.  It doesn’t work that way. Saying that, “They’re just investing the money” doesn’t describe how it feels because they weren’t investing it in us. They were investing it in themselves. It wasn’t coming back.

But, I suspect, while we peons were down here arguing about the money that was left, nobody paid any attention to those people who took most of it and left them with the scraps. I suspect that, as there was less and less money to be fighting about, our rhetoric got toxic. Sure, unions were greedy and to blame for some of the problems, but they weren’t the only ones and they weren’t the cause of everything collapsing. It took Robber Baron CEOs and ponzi schemes in Real Estate to do that. Sure, fiscal conservatives were right, you have to trim the fat from the budget. But once you’re down to the skeleton, there is no fat.  And no matter how many times Rush Limbaugh yells about the “liberal whiners” who “want more than they have the right to”, when the “right” they want is to simply live, or eat and have a job, people don’t care any more.  It takes a phony war, rich mercenaries and a company like Halliburton to get us this broke.  To quote Bruce Springsteen, America’s “got debts no honest man could pay” and now we’re “standin’  wavin’ a gun around”.

98% of America’s “got tough choices to make” while 2% of America works up a sweat and claims\thinks\acts like it’s broke.  That brings us way past the L word or even the C word (conservative) to the “R” word. But maybe the “R” word isn’t revolution, maybe it’s “remember”. Remember that greed is not good. Remember that people are not to be taken advantage of. Remember that at some point, it gets absurd and people catch on. Remember that it really can get that bad out there. Remember that you have the right to be angry but don’t yell at the wrong people.  Remember where the money went. Oops that’s revolution again.

Peace,

 

John