Summer Camp Begins: Adventist Tradition, Successful Evangelism and Young Adult Ministry
By AT News Team, June 3, 2015: In the next two weeks, Adventist summer camps will begin in about 60 locations across North America. Before the summer is over, some 25,000 to 30,000 children will participate and nearly 2,000 young adults are already arriving at the camp facilities this week to prepare. It is “our brightest young adults doing the most incredible mentoring of next generations,” observed Dr. Allan Martin, young adult pastor at the Arlington Church in the suburbs of Dallas, Texas, who once served as professor of youth ministry at Andrews University.
Youth camps started among Adventists in the United States in the 1950s when the Baby Boom swelled the numbers of adolescents in the faith and concern about juvenile delinquency was at its height in the larger culture. It has become a formative experience for generations of youth growing up in Adventist families.
Each of the 58 local conferences in the North American Division (NAD) offers camps for several different age groups and with specialized focus each summer. Typically this will include a Cub Camp for ages 6 through 9, one or more Junior Camps for ages 10 through 13, and at least one Teen Camp for ages 13 through 17. Specialized camps for various age ranges include horse camp, ski camp, music camp, soccer camp and often a family camp where parents come along and participate as well.
It is one of the largest evangelism programs of the denomination with about 3,000 young people making decisions to become baptized members of the church each summer. About one in six of these are actually baptized while they are at camp, often in the swimming pool. Most are sent home with a letter from the camp pastor to the pastor of their congregation back home stating that they have requested baptism. The majority of summer camp attenders are already baptized before they arrive, according to a survey conducted by the Hancock Center for Youth and Family Ministry at La Sierra University.
The camp facilities are funded by the conferences, using a small percentage of the Tithe Fund. The actual cost of operations each summer are generally funded from fees that run about $250 to $300 a week. “Not a bad price for a week of feeding, housing and supervising an adolescent,” one parent told Adventist Today.
Summer camp fills an important niche in the youth ministry of the denomination for several reasons. One is that nearly two-thirds of the children who attend are not enrolled in Adventist schools, according to the Hancock Center survey. One in five rarely or never attend an Adventist church.
“It is not uncommon for an Adventist grandparent to send their grandchildren to camp,” a youth director told Adventist Today. “I was told by a woman last summer that she offered to pay for her grandchildren to attend an Adventist school, but the parents did not want to do that. Yet, they were happy for the kids to go to summer camp.”
It is one of the happiest things for Adventist young people. Three out of four attenders rated their experience at summer camp a nine or ten on a 10-point scale of “how much did you enjoy camp” in the Hancock Center survey. Not a single child out of 4,613 in the sample rated it below a four.
Adventist summer camps have had a very positive impact on the children who have attended over the past seven decades. Today’s adults often cite it as the most important experience they had with an Adventist ministry, even though they may no longer attend church. The Hancock Center survey found that 68 percent of summer camp attenders agreed that “it is important to me that I am an Adventist” and 59 percent agreed that it was important to “attend worship at an Adventist church.”
The summer camp experience also gave children an open, progressive perspective with 84 percent agreeing “I like to try new things,” 91 percent agreeing “I enjoy going to new places,” and 75 percent agreeing “trying new things is important to me.” It also gave young people a sense of respect and fairness toward others with 83 percent agreeing that “It’s more important to play fair than to win,” and 83 percent agreeing “I respect other people.” It also helped to build a strong environmental awareness and positive spiritual development.
The data at the top of this story about NAD summer camps was compiled in late 2013 from reports submitted by all of the conference youth departments to the NAD office. Adventist Today could not find similar data from the rest of the world. A search of the official General Conference Archives and Statistics web site yielded no worldwide statistics on youth camps. Sources have told Adventist Today that there are similar activities in Australia and New Zealand, and a somewhat different approach to camping in Europe, but no information could be obtained from Latin America, Africa or Asia.
04 June 2015 @ 10:16 am
This is indeed a great experience for the “attenders” as you wrote.
It is also a great experience for the (mostly college) young adults who are the staff. For them also being staff at a summer camp can be a transformational experience. Someone should do a study on their attitudes before and after working at summer camp.
It is more blessed to give than to receive.
Win! – Win!
05 June 2015 @ 8:10 pm
So nice to read a positive report for a change.
06 June 2015 @ 6:43 pm
Why does the article refer to youth camps starting in the 1950s? Does this refer to what we think of today as youth camps, with cabins, formal buildings, etc? I ask because both my parents attended summer camp way before the 1950s, although I believe both of their experiences involved tents.
07 June 2015 @ 7:08 pm
Thank you for a very find article on SDA Christian camping. The article was very postive and informative. However, just a few comments. The research conducted by the John Hancock Center was commissioned by the NAD Camp Ministries Committee and much of the planning and organization was done by members of the NAD Camp Committee. Funding was provided by the NAD. This was the first study of its kind by any denomination. Results have been published and shared with all church administrators. I would have wished that someone one from our committee would have been interviewed by your writers to get a more completed picture of the scope of SDA camping in North American. We could have provided some other interesting facts and info. For example we found that 60% of those who work on summer staff make positive decisions to work for the church as a result of the summer camp experience. Praise God. Thanks again, however, for writing a very fine article highlightin one of our most successful evangelistic efforts of the church.
Bill Wood
Cordinator
NAD Camp Ministries
08 June 2015 @ 8:08 am
As I was thinking about how–or even whether–to respond, I thought many people will probably think my primary suggestion is hopelessly out-of-date. Times have changed. Or maybe even something about attracting a “different demographic”. I also know there are some disadvantages to “camping” and one of them is the difficulty of providing adequate supervision. I still think, however, that camping (and yes, I mean in tents) is the best setting for evangelism.
There is nothing wrong, of course, with the word, “tradition”. Anything we do repeatedly can be considered a tradition. During the first few decades of my life, however, I never heard anyone refer to anything as an “Adventist tradition” and there was a good reason for that. Avoiding that language was a way of encouraging people to realize that true Christianity is not based on tradition.
It is sad but true that some things have been done so long and some language has been used so long that those things have come to be regarded by members of our denomination in much the same way that members of other denominations appeal to their traditions in support of religious beliefs and religious practices. Maybe it is time for a “camp” the purpose of which is for adventist young people to explore “traditional” Adventist language with the goal of developing language and methods that encourage a kind of evangelism that has (in my opinion) practically been lost in our denomination.
Some years ago, I attended a series of meetings in an SdA church building. The pastor was the primary speaker. One of the laymen was asked to make short presentations about health principles at the beginning of each meeting.
In the course of one of the meetings, the layman used the phrase, “the church” during the presentation of a health principle. He used that word in a way that has come to be an “Adventist tradition”, namely, in reference to the Seventh-day Adventist organization.
After the visitors had left the building, the pastor asked the layman to avoid using the word, “the church”, in that way during the meetings. Why? Because protestants are accustomed to thinking of believers as constituting the church. It isn’t wise, in the context of a lecture about health principles, to introduce a different definition of “church” than that to which protestants are accustomed.
If we are ever going to be successful in encouraging people to question THEIR traditions about a weekly holy day or the state of the dead, it will be because we have been willing to reexamine our own “traditions”.
What is “the faith”? What is “Evangelism”? Do we “attend worship” or do we worship? Do we refer to the building as “the church”? Compared to those of us who are older, young people who are passionate about encouraging faith in the creator are more likely to be able to overcome the disadvantages of some “Adventist traditions”. We don’t need to control the young people. We need to unleash them.
08 June 2015 @ 8:47 am
In my Summer Camp years we stayed in both tents and in cabins.
Tents for summer camps have fallen out-of-favor for several reasons, including the fire and storm safety issues and the large amount of labor involved in set-up, take-down and maintenance, which in my student labor years I performed.
Yet one feels closer to nature in a tent (for better and for worse 8-). I still treasure the times I shared a tent with my boys when they were young.