Summer Camp Debriefing...
I love camp! I love the lack of sleep, the camp food, the activities, the worship services and the smelly, often overly stimulated teenagers. In one way it gets back to the basics of community; we will sleep under one roof, we will eat together, we will play together and we will worship together. Communal living and the communal approach to worship is manifested because after an experience (like the last night of camp) you can celebrate immediately with friends who are supportive. Then we leave...
It's the post-camp blues that pastors and mentors must cultivate and pay attention to. Debriefing if you will, allows students to process the magnitude of their emotions, their experiences, and their feelings about what was/could have been the best week of their summer! However, with a heavy dose of skepticism, the camp mindset cultivates an immediate response, sometimes a manipulated response so that teens, when seeing their friends go to the altar to make decisions, follow suit. How much of these decisions are thought through? How many of the decisions are straight emotional responses to the overwhelming sense of God's presence? It takes discernment to know, and through my own skeptical eyes, I was sitting in the back of the tabernacle hoping my students were making impactful decisions, not for the sake of "having the experience," but for the sake of kick starting their journey with Jesus, for making a monument that they could point too in the future. So what do you do with an emotionally charged bunch that most certainly will hit a roadblock consisting of people who aren't supportive (school) and won't share in their excitement?
I believe we must cultivate a pattern of confession, repentance and celebration. Every night at camp the altars were lined with students, often the same students every night. Let's take this experience, implement it into a daily lifestyle that always calls us to repent and call on God to make us holy. After all, we are never made more holy than when we are confessing our sins and declaring our reliance upon God's grace and mercy. We take heed of the words of 1 John 1:9, "If we confess our sins he is faithful and just and will forgive us and cleanse us from unrighteousness." Camp does not lead us back to the lowliness of daily routine, but ought to renew our imaginations to live life within community that allows us to decompress, confess, repent and celebrate with each other. Because life is hard, and we're at the crossroads...let's decide to follow Him.
It's the post-camp blues that pastors and mentors must cultivate and pay attention to. Debriefing if you will, allows students to process the magnitude of their emotions, their experiences, and their feelings about what was/could have been the best week of their summer! However, with a heavy dose of skepticism, the camp mindset cultivates an immediate response, sometimes a manipulated response so that teens, when seeing their friends go to the altar to make decisions, follow suit. How much of these decisions are thought through? How many of the decisions are straight emotional responses to the overwhelming sense of God's presence? It takes discernment to know, and through my own skeptical eyes, I was sitting in the back of the tabernacle hoping my students were making impactful decisions, not for the sake of "having the experience," but for the sake of kick starting their journey with Jesus, for making a monument that they could point too in the future. So what do you do with an emotionally charged bunch that most certainly will hit a roadblock consisting of people who aren't supportive (school) and won't share in their excitement?
I believe we must cultivate a pattern of confession, repentance and celebration. Every night at camp the altars were lined with students, often the same students every night. Let's take this experience, implement it into a daily lifestyle that always calls us to repent and call on God to make us holy. After all, we are never made more holy than when we are confessing our sins and declaring our reliance upon God's grace and mercy. We take heed of the words of 1 John 1:9, "If we confess our sins he is faithful and just and will forgive us and cleanse us from unrighteousness." Camp does not lead us back to the lowliness of daily routine, but ought to renew our imaginations to live life within community that allows us to decompress, confess, repent and celebrate with each other. Because life is hard, and we're at the crossroads...let's decide to follow Him.
posted by Levi at
9:24 AM
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