We didn’t waste any time on Night One. As a speaker, my job was to get straight to the point, to help campers realize I had something they needed to hear. I welcomed them to that place called camp, pointing out the obvious: not only were they surrounded by hundreds of other really good-looking humans, such as themselves, but all those really good-looking humans (such as themselves) were about to embark on the best week of their lives. Sometimes I also told them a little story about the lone Black man sitting in the far back corner, a man whom I happened to call my husband.
I probably said something like this: “Now, campers, after James and I had been dating for a few months, he decided it was time for me to meet the family. This was a really big deal, like a Really Big Deal with a capital RBD. But we did it. We said yes. The two of us hopped on a plane on our way to Jackson, Mississippi; after we landed, we got in a rental car and drove twenty minutes down the road to a little gray house. It was time to meet his parents, James and Judy, and all the other Js: his sister, Jessica; and her four kids, Janae, Jameria, Jaylah, and little baby James.”
Although the night was far from theologically meaty, I likely talked about how nervous I felt in the moment, how my heart was beating like a big, bad drum—a pa-pum, pa-pum, pa-pum so loud it must have leapt out of my chest, straight onto the outsides of pale white skin.
But then I told them about the welcome we experienced in the little gray house—a welcome sung by a chorus of shouts that felt like enveloping hugs for the uncle they ached to see. “Have you ever been somewhere and immediately felt right at home?” I probably asked them. I wanted to connect with the campers; I wanted the anecdote to stir something inside them, something to make them feel right at home.
But the real climax of the talk came when I began to tell a tale of playing hide-and-go-seek with the nieces and nephews. Even though I sat in Granddaddy’s recliner, closing my eyes and counting a drawn-out one Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mississippi, all the way up to thirty Mississippi, the unimaginable happened when I yelled out, “Ready or not, here I come!”
A little voice chirped out, “Ready!” And then another, and another, and another too: “Ready!” “Ready!” “Ready!” The chirping children had given away their sacred hiding spots. The little birds had made themselves known.
This, of course, allowed me to make a critical point, both about the illustrative story and about the campers who sat on concrete steps around the campfire pit, on wooden benches surrounded by swirling strands of switchgrass, or on a polypropylene carpet in a grand, wooden clubroom: These children were ready in Mississippi, I must have emphasized. They couldn’t wait to be found in Mississippi. These young ones played a different kind of hide-and-go-seek: they played a game of wanting to be found.
I could only hope the parallel was obvious: Some of us were hiding. Some of us were just waiting, asking, hoping to be found. And many of us, no matter where we are on our respective spiritual journeys, would be found that week at camp.
Because for all of us, this was a story of being found.
But for the prayer, the names God and Jesus were never uttered in the first night’s talk. They didn’t have to be because, as the one whose feet proclaimed the gospel, the invitation to enter into all that lay ahead was more than enough. After all, the first night of camp was always the most thrilling and ecstatic, an evening kept afloat with a pious kind of sex appeal and accompanying nods to the Holy Spirit.
“If sex appeal can infiltrate the Christian camping scene,” one interviewee recalled, “then it was like the apostle Paul himself preached the gospel in a strapless corset teddy, bunny ears, and black sheer-to-waist pantyhose on the first night of camp!” I laughed at his description, crass as it may sound. But he was right: We pulled out all the stops. We gave it our all in an effort to show campers they really were going to have the best week of their lives. We shouted it into the microphone. We sang it in our songs. No matter our role, we rallied, we performed, we ushered our audiences into buying what only we alone could offer.
The invitation for campers to ready themselves for the next six days—relationally, physically, and spiritually—was presented through story, laughter, and an electric kind of energy. As a speaker, my entire job was to establish trust: like a many-armed octopus, all eight of my proverbial appendages sought to reach down from the stage and suction on to each one of those little camper hearts.
Along the way, I would become their guide. I would establish a case for Christ. Following a prescribed set of themes already laid out before me, I knew my whole goal was to lead them toward an affirmative answer to a single question: Will you say yes to God’s invitation? However it came across, I stood on stage, flapping my arms and telling my stories and animating my face entirely so campers could come to a place of realization and knowing, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that Jesus had died on the cross for them and them alone. Because at some point during the week, they would be asked to respond to an invitation of faith.
Conversion, after all, was the entire point.
But before we tackle the language of conversion, we have to examine the role of the converter. The word converter is an agent noun (a noun derived from a verb) of the word convert. First recorded in the 1530s, the word wouldn’t be associated with appliances or electronic devices for another three hundred years; instead, its sole connotation was to its parent action, to “a change or turn from one religion to another.” The role of the converter was to win over and change, to turn around and bend and transform. And the role of the converter, as it turns out, was almost always associated with a turn toward the Christian religion.
In a recent video from the popular Instagram account Pastor Humor, a clean-cut white man gives a four-sentence statement about planning for the upcoming Easter services. Biceps bulge out of a tight purple shirt, a flesh-colored mic strung across his cheek. The presumed pastor looks straight into the camera and addresses his staff: “I need drama. I need commitment. I need performance. I need production value . . . from you.”
A Celine Dion song plays in the background, and every sentence, in turn, results in a purposeful reach toward the sky. He alternates his hands as he speaks the first three phrases, hand dropping into a fist, arm muscles further bulging in response. After stating the third need, he pauses, wiping sweat from his perfectly manicured brows. Then, lifting both hands in the air, he points straight at the camera and speaks the words from you, no sooner crossing his arms in defiance across his chest. The video would be even more hilarious if it weren’t so true. Whether we’re talking about the biggest Sunday morning of the church calendar year or just another day at church camp, the dramatics are real. The show must go on, or for our purposes here, the show must be put on—even if this is also, oftentimes, the best part of camp.
When kids go to camp, they expect everything about the whole week to be big. Whether it’s a child’s first summer or their ninth year in a row (and they sport an impressive collection of camp T-shirts to prove it), campers are often blown away by the theatrics of seven days at church camp. Where else can they gorge from a communal hundred-foot-long trough filled with ice cream, chocolate syrup, and whipped cream? Where else does music accompany their every step from early wake-up calls to slumbering lights-out lullabies to three-hundred-person choruses sung before a roaring campfire? Where else do women dressed in red, white, and blue sequined spandex zip line through the dining hall during a meal, all for the sake of breaking down walls and making someone laugh?
Memories like these oftentimes only happen at camp when staff are encouraged not only to think big but to be big too. Campers, in turn, can’t help but buy into an environment of excess. Camp, after all, is campy. It leans into an identity of being big and outlandish, of absurd exaggeration and ridiculous hilariousness, and rightfully so: all of this is what makes camp camp. Even those who are critical of camps—like Susan Sontag, essayist behind “Notes on ‘Camp,’” who defined its key elements as “artifice frivolity, naïve middle-class pretentiousness, and shocking excess”—recognize that campy excesses are often what draw campers in the first place and keep them coming back for more.
I may not have been leading future reality television stars down pathways to stardom, but I did learn how to put on a show for the many campers who crossed over pathways to camp—all in the name of Jesus and for purposes of conversion to Jesus. And put on a show, I did.
I squirted chocolate syrup over unholy amounts of ice cream in hundred-foot-long troughs that were eventually filled with regurgitated spit. I sang songs, led songs, practiced songs, and taught others the words and motions to songs like “Look All Around You,” “For I Am Persuaded,” and “Somebody’s Calling Out Your Name.” It is entirely possible that every lyric and hand motion, courtesy of camp songs from 1988 through 2014 or so, live eternally in the recesses of my mind. I rode zip lines forty feet above the ground in Americana-colored spandex while “American Woman” by Lenny Kravitz played on loudspeakers in the background. (It should also be said that I carried a watermelon while riding said zip line, not in an effort to imitate Baby from Dirty Dancing but to honor the Fourth of the July. If fire permits don’t allow for a display of fireworks, one can at least watch fruit explode from on high and call it fruit works.) As I recall these memories, I can only smile: there’s nothing like a week at church camp, that much is true.
But sometimes putting on a show for Jesus crosses a line. When the programmatics of church camp move from the precepts of loving God and loving other people in places of pristine nature to instead selling the theatrics of a major world religion in a manicured luxury resort, we’ve somehow gotten it wrong. God isn’t something to be sold, even if we humans thought that was part of the deal.
If we could break down walls, then we could gain their trust. And if we could gain their trust, then we could convince them of our beliefs—of an individualistic kind of saving that only happens at the hands of a man named Jesus. Because if we could just do this, then everything would be okay in the end. This became our story because it was the tale passed down to us, a narrative that came from a place of tradition and belief and from the very foundations on which white evangelicalism and the Christian camping movement were built.
This is an excerpt from Church Camp chapter 1: Welcome to Camp!
