Children's Ministries

Reader Submitted Photo: Camp Rules

155 Comments

There are a few burning questions about this list. For one, what school-aged kid carries a beeper? And who is bringing their “story books”? I can just imagine those lights-out conversations “I’ll trade you both Cat In The Hat’s for your Curious George!” That’s some serious sin in the camp.

155 thoughts on “Reader Submitted Photo: Camp Rules”

  1. ha! good point Darrell. What adult uses beepers for that matter. =P

    I like how the kids are directed to mark all items with their name – does that include sheets, money, towel etc? haha

    And they still call the snack place a Canteen? Really? Heh…the 1940s called, they want their name back.

      1. Well that’s a Fundie Organization worthy of it own “Stuff Uncle Sammy Likes” web site. You just can’t get away from that mind set can you? 😉 From one structured fundie organization to another…. *tsk, tsk, poor Darrell* 😎

      2. i’ll assume they provided you with the pager…but where do the get them? who sells pagers these days?

        2. Unication? Sounds like a subsidary of Sun Young Moon’s Church. You may be under demonic influence through subliminal messages that the Moonies are sending across that..is it a true beeper or a messaging pager? The latter would be worse. Sounds like we need to set up an email prayer wheel just for you and your beeper. 🙄

    2. There’s a campground that we go to in the Summer (I LOVE camping, if you call camping in a pop-up with a bathroom and kitchen) and they have a little store and I still call it a canteen… just seems right somehow.

        1. Originally, I used it because of fundy camp, but now I use it because my brain is perpetually stuck in the 1950’s.

      1. My apologies to the beeper-carriers. I just thought most people did the Blackberry or Cricket (chirp, chirp) thing.

  2. “sin in the camp”.. ha ha.. I love it.

    Ah, yes, the infamous camp list. We had that.. We also had our own camp.

    But, what age anyone carries a beeper anymore. Leave it to fundies. Why don’t we just add to that list 8-track cassettes and boom boxes.

    Yeah, kids, don’t bring anything that would entertain you on your downtime. We will tell you when and what to entertain yourself.

    And, for that matter, we’ll also tell you when to smile… but don’t get your hopes up.

    1. i like the whole “sin in the camp” thing. As if some proverbial 3rd grad “achin” is gonna have a dr suess book buried under his tent.

      1. It’s ironic how Fundycamp puts a lot of pressure in confessing your breach of camp rules and making things right (aka. turning in your pager to the Counselor and risking camp expulsion). When I worked at the Wilds, I let my campers get away with stuff. 😈

      3. My favorite story book: “Curious George and the High Voltage Fence” (it’s a pretty short book)

    2. @Natalie, “Yeah, kids, don’t bring anything that would entertain you on your downtime. We will tell you when and what to entertain yourself.

      Yup. That’s their point exactly. I’m a bookworm, so I would have wanted to bring my “storybooks.” Arggh. What a silly name. Obviously, they don’t want romance novels, Twilight/Harry Potter, etc. so they just ban all fiction. Could I really make it through a whole week without reading? I guess if they scheduled enough chapel times I could! 🙄

      1. Me too! I love reading, and when I was a kid, I could never understand why they banned books. 😕

      2. I never understood that prohibition, either. I think I smuggled a book with me one year. That’s not even counting the year I worked on staff and brought books with me to read during my down time. Most of the staff broke that rule and the one against playing cards.

    3. My 1st camp experience – around 4th grade or so – a kid in my cabin was caught with Playboy in his luggage. But isn’t that sort of a rite of passage? Kind of like having the 1st taste of beer when your 14-16 yrs old. And NO, I was not the kid that was caught with the Playboy. I never got caught. 😆

    4. lol, I just pictured some guy walking in with one of those big 80s style boom boxes, starting a fundy break dance craze (I guess culottes would be required, because that would get real scary in a skirt).

        2. Especially those stupid fundie culottes. I’m short so I always got away with letting the hem out of my shorts, it was just a TAD bit cooler than the alternative, but not much.

  3. We just can’t get away from men’s jewelry, can we? 😉

    I remember going to a summer camp for a few years. Our fundy church quit participating, because it got too liberal – we could wear shorts, and they lead the singing with an acoustic guitar.

    The hidden message about summer taking a turn for the worse was right on, though. There were far more pricks at the religious camp than there were at the [secular] 4-H camp I attended the next year.

      1. It’s a lot less common these days but once upon a time the guitar was considered the instrument of hippies and rock n’ roll and as such an inappropriate instrument for worship.

        My brother and I play classical duets on guitar but at each church we’d visit we would have to make sure it was ok with the pastor that we use a guitar in his service just to be on the safe side.

        1. Do they not know that pianos are also used in rock music, country music, dance halls, strip joints, etc.? There’s even a special kind of night club called a “piano bar”?

        3. @Big Gary: “Do they not know that pianos are also used in rock music, country music, dance halls, strip joints, etc.?” It started driving me crazy that the reasons they used to demonize guitars could really be used on pianos too, only they’d already decided pianos were OK.

          (The people who left our church were offended that we had a guy on stage playing an acoustic guitar.)

        4. On the subject of suiitable instruments for worship, I play the harp for relaxation. (Harpo Marx was my inspiration, though I just play a small folk harp) I’m not very good yet, but would like to be able to play in Church. Would the harp be OK for Fundamentalists? After all, they’re played in heaven…. Or does Heaven have something to learn from Fundamentist Churches?

      2. Absolutely, positively, friggin NOTHING, BUT, some fundie churches don’t like them because country/rock musicians use them.

        Now, the exception to this is the music I was raised to and that’s blue grass. Guitars are acceptable in my area where blue grass is the Christian music of choice (now, play blue grass and hymns together and they’re lovin’ you).

        I have to admit. I love blue grass. Secular or Christian. It’s in my blood.

        1. Love that bluegrass music! I probably shouldn’t do this but just found out a couple of weeks ago that someone put my little bluegrass group on you tube, we were playing for a river baptism. Just go to you tube and put in our name “Shenandoah Baptist Boys” sound quality is not that great and unless you have some decent speakers you can’t even hear the base. Well since I’ve already done that and while you’re already on you tube, my son put us on you tube playing a little bit of blues. (tsettleguitar)

        2. Cool! I’ll check it out. Yeah, I can wail to some bluegrass. I love singing high tenor. Christian bluegrass is easier for me because I know all the words and the harmonies.

        3. When I say “wail”, by the way, I’m not saying I’m any good. I’m saying that I’m just loud.

        4. Greg, just got a chance to check out the vids. I was throwing my high tenor in there, especially to “Blessed Jesus”. 😉 That’s one of my favorites to harmonize to.

        5. That was great! I love all sorts of different styles of music, although we don’t hear a lot of bluegrass up here in . . . oops! Almost forgot that I’m trying to be anonymous here! I love singing alto harmony!

          The blues were great too! How awesome that you and your son can play together!

        6. Greg, one of these days when I’m not feeling like being anonymous, too, I’ll send you the video of my Grandfather playing guitar that my cousin has on YouTube. It’s great. He’s 92 and still can play well.

        7. Tks – I was debating about it, but I figured 12 zillion more people have the ability to look at it on you-tube then the handful that come here.

        8. @Natalie – My Dad is guitar monster and he’s 83 – my son also plays in a very “wild” christian rock group, you know the one with the “screamers” but I don’t think anyone on here is ready for all that, I don’t even like it. Coming fron fundyland it has really been interesting and challenging for me to allow him to play this stuff, I’m hoping its a phase. But he loves the Lord very much and is not ashamed of the gospel of Christ. When his group plays out they always testify about God and even offer for the kids to call upon the Lord for salvation. I think I got him out of fundyland in time for it not to have damaged him too much.

          I can hear my ol fundy preacher now “Bless God thats two words that never go together, Christian and Rock”

  4. I couldn’t help but notice “swimming suit” conspicuously missing from the “what to bring” list for the daily 30 minute segregated swimming. Also missing? One word: culottes.Also what not to bring? Your own brain for cognitive self-thought.

      1. Man on man is that spot on. Morning, afternoon & of the course the “MAIN” evening chapel. With “cabin devotions” at night and a season of prayer over every meal and scrap of food.

        2. And even with all that, plus a huge list of Scripture verses we had to memorize, my ex-pastor still insisted he couldn’t totally approve of youth camps because we spent too much time playing.

      2. Hahahaha! No pressure altar call! At the camp I went to, “invitations” lasted up to 3 hours. Everyone (I do mean EVERYONE) was “invited”, and until everyone went to the altar, the invitation would not close. Then they had this precious idea: Everyone who came forward had to line up and say what decision they made. I stopped going forward any time I could avoid it, just so I wouldn’t have to tell everyone my personal business.

    2. You mean “bathing suit,” not “swimming suit,” right? And you call yourself and ex-fundy. 😉

  5. The sad part is when they come back from camp they will be expected to give the “church” a report on camp. And the powers that be don’t want to hear about any fun the campers had, noooo they want to hear about how many were saved! (again, for the 4th and 5th time in some cases) How the Lord moved, what good preaching they heard, what worldly activities they are now convinced they should give up in order to be in the absolute center of god’s will. How many were called to full-time christian service… How many sicks were tossed into the fire and what each stick represented….yadda, yadda, yadda…ad nauseum. Yep another glorious summer filled with Fundie festivities. “Draw Swords! Job 25:7…. Charge!” (see how many get it)

    1. In reality, 8,463 professions of faith were made (in fact, there was a contest to see how many times you could get saved), 58 kids got caught making out behind the chapel, 39 boys got caught trying to sneek a peek in the girls cabins, 45 girls got caught sneeking a peek in the boy’s, and 36 Playboys were confiscated, but ironically, they disappeared completely after being taken away.

        1. Yes, I have done sword drills. I may have even won once or twice. But it’s been a long time, and in this case I just tried to look it up on BibleGateway (NIV 2010 version).

        2. Sword drill – to me, this brings to mind words like “Vom Tag,” “Unterhau,” and “Stecken.” Bonus: teaching two of my sons basic footwork and guards between activities in the church parking lot. Our associate pastor DEFINITELY didn’t know what to say… :mrgreen:

    3. Oh my goodness, Don! I was reprimanded by my youth pastor because I mentioned that I had fun at camp.

      Also, this camp was never returned to, because the camp took all the campers to a roller skating rink. Nevermind, the camp rented the entire rink for the night and only played hymns to skate to. 😯

      Fun=not allowed to mention in testimony. Got it!

      1. You haven’t REALLY roller-skated until you’ve roller skated to Ron Hamilton (Patch the Pirate). Yep, that’s what we roller-skated to as little kids in the 80’s and 90’s (of course, our church rented the rink, to avoid us being exposed to ungodly music, foul company, and the Hokie Pokie).

  6. “Story books” – yeah, like the demon-possessed Harry Potter.
    “Magazines” – don’t want those kids bringing their Playboy. Or Mad Magazine. Or TableTalk.
    “Earrings on boys” – what if I just brought my earrings while it wasn’t on a boy? Could I bring them then?

    “Bible (KJV)” – this one especially rankles me. This past summer, my son went to camp for the first time. While there, he was told that he “didn’t have the correct Bible. (he had an ESV).” Now, this was not a Fundy camp or at least, I didn’t think it was. When he came home and said he had to use a different Bible because they wouldn’t let him use his, I was livid. How do you explain to a very concerned boy that no, he does NOT have the wrong Bible?

    1. re: the errings for boys. Don’t worry about it, hey it’s camp, they can make one as their project during Craft time. Just say it’s for mom… then wear it home. 😎

    2. The Bible version thing is annoying. If a camp is going to insist on a particular version, they need to make that clear in the promotional material, not harass children who show up with the “wrong” Bible.

      1. I can almost guarantee you that they had a stock of KJV’s for any kid who showed up with the wrong version.

        Or, depending on how hard up they are, they charged him for it.

        1. Yup..the Dollar General KJV (no expenses spared) with .05 font. Even when I was young I still couldn’t read it. Now? Forgeddabowdet.

      2. Fundie schools and Colleges have the answer for that. They have been practicing it for years:
        “Well, they knew what they were signing up for.” 🙄

        2. @Don- Sadly that’s not always the case. Some people aren’t given the right info and are deceived into it. (I could go on a 10-page rant about this, but I’ll refrain) Makes me mad. 👿

        3. That’s the incidious part of that reply. The fundies have the answer memorized but the truth is most of the “rules” and “requirements” are not detailed until AFTER one is committed to attending or participating in the Fundie Follies.

        4. They don’t give you all the information beforehand, yet they become angry when you get mad at them for that. AARGH!

        5. Wait…aren’t we making fun of a camp that is telling everybody “up front”?

          There have to be rules, and the KJV thing may be just so everyone is on the same page and to cut down on confusion.

        6. @Theo, speaking just for me, I appreciate that Living Waters Baptist Youth Camp DOES tell campers which Bible version they expect. (I think kids would benefit more from reading a version written in today’s English, but that’s another conversation.)

          But even if a camp lets campers know ahead of time that they want a KJV Bible, it’s wrong to make a child feel bad for bringing the wrong one and I personally think it’s vile to make the child think that his personal Bible (be it ESV or whatever) somehow ISN’T the Word of God. How much more gracious is it to let the camper use one of the extras on-hand saying, “You might want to read along in this Bible for chapel since this is the one the speaker will be using” than to try to shame or embarrass him because he didn’t bring a KJV.

  7. further down on the list, there are instructions for culottes (MUST BE WORN TO THE KNEE. WE PREFER THESE ON GIRLS.) and knee pants on boys (seriously? “knee pants”?). no muscle shirts either, which is a shame because they look pretty good with knee pants.

    1. I just started laughing when I read knee pants.

      I think the next issue of GQ should feature men in knee pants and muscle shirts.

      1. “Blues in the Night” (1941)

        My Momma done tol’ me
        When I was in knee pants
        My Momma done tol’ me, “Son,
        A woman will sweet talk
        And give ya the big eye,
        But when the sweet talkin’s done
        A woman’s a two-face,
        A worrisome thing
        Who’ll leave ya to sing
        The blues in the night.

        Still seems be the place Fundies are coming from.
        Sigh.

  8. Old days….bad times I remember…
    Fun-dies….keeeping you from pleasure….

    sorry

    too much Chicago for one small mind.

  9. They probably refer to movies as “picture shows” and soaps as “stories”. Of course, my grandmother pronounced it “STOW-rees”.

  10. I almost lost my coffee to the “What not to bring”…”Earrings on Boys”

    I think if I were the parent of such a boy I’d be leaving the website immediately. Do they really think that by leaving your earring at home that they’ll reach that crowed? By making the boys look like them that it will be easier to reach them or something? The only reason I can fathom for such a rule is because you feel uncomfortable or threatened by the mere presence of an earring on a boy.

    1. It’s the “start from the outer conformity then work to the inner truth” method.

      It’s what says that if we force people to have their devotions each morning that eventually it will become meaningful.

      1. Sad, really. Their method only produces shallowness; to really change, they need to work on the inside first, and then what’s outside will eventually reflect what’s on the inside (not right away… these things cannot be forced otherwise it could be quite damaging, imo).

    2. Clean the outside of the cup, paint the outside of the tomb… same way it was done 2000 years ago…. 🙁

    1. “Yes, Counselor, I did read the list. But this isn’t ‘tobbacco,’ it’s ‘tobacco,’ see?”

      Would it be all right to bring my earrings if I put them on a girl? Camp would be more fun that way anyway.

    1. No, but i know how much havoc a frog can cause when thrown into a girls cabin at midnight. LOL. Don’t ask me how I know…I just know.

      1. And, in case you lack a frog or iguania, throwing a bucket of ice cold water on someone in the shower will work in a pinch.

        I have no idea how I know that… I heard it somewhere… yeah…

  13. If you go to the website, they have their very own “Old fashioned altar” at camp– the “rock altar”. . .

    1. Yeah, someone in my family goes regularly to this ministry and talks very fondly about the so-called power that can be found by praying day and night at this rock altar.

      Correct me if I’m wrong:

      Prayer – yes. Extended prayer – great. More power than we already possess in Christ by praying at this one location? – not so much. Telling everyone about the extended praying and the power – well, you have your reward.

    2. Our church has been to this camp. It’s horrible!!! A friend told me her brother used to try to peel the money off the rock altar. I think he got almost $10 one week. 😆

    1. You are fortunate … I counted it up once, and I’ve attended more than 15 weeks of fundy summer camp in my life. These were some of the worst weeks of my life too.

      1. I’ve been to Fundy camps on numerous occasions but only once to an actual summer camp. It was The Wilds. I thought it’d be fun, because when I was really young my dad would take me there for the weekend-long father-son camping trips and I have nothing but good memories of those.

        Summer camp was different–they split up our church group so it was only myself and two friends in a cabin with a lot of strangers and a counselor from BJU who made sure to inform us about his struggle with masturbation, and of course gobs of preaching and mandatory games and soulful music during invitations and guilt for I wasn’t sure what reason.

        I also went to BJU for a week of art camp one year, but I don’t count that as “camp.” And about all I remember of it is six days of crippling loneliness.

        1. Went to the Wilds the summer after going to camp at the Bill Rice Ranch. My goodness, The Bill Rice Ranch was one service after another, and another. Wilds was fun compared to the Bill Rice Ranch. I wanted to go to the Bill Rice Ranch because on their brochure it said they had horse back riding. I loved horseback riding. How disappointed I was to not get a chance to go horseback riding the whole week but sit in that open sided pavilion type thing and just watch the horses grazing.

          Went to the Bill Rice Ranch after New Life Island (“evil” GARBC camp took all the campers roller skating to hymns) New Life Island was a lot of fun.http://www.nli.org/ Bill Rice Ranch was a drag. The Wilds was only slightly better than Bill Rice Ranch.

        2. Oh, Lord, I forgot about the Bill Rice Ranch. Yep–spent a week there, too. Bored to death the whole time. Spent too much on a cowboy hat. Got farted on by a horse.

  15. What kind of place would put “story books” and TOBACCO PRODUCTS in the same list? Is this an ‘early release’ program for hardened pre-adolescents?

        3. You need to find a new hiding spot. The Legos are the 1st place I look when searching for drugs and paraphernalia. All the big dealers are using Legos to hide their stash these days.

      1. Ha! So true. Many inappropriate verses just popped into my head. Wisdom literature for the win!
        😯

    2. Omw… the first and only time I went to the Wilds, I remember this guy making it all the way to lunch time with one such shirt… I couldn’t believe the counselor didn’t catch it and to top that apparently none of the other girls knew what it meant! gah… But, the funiest part was that right before we prayed, the guy’s counselor realized what his shirt said and made him take it off and turn it inside out. LOL dinner and a show. 😯

        2. Oh, it didn’t have any verse at all on it… it had a big yellow school bus on it and it said: “Wait, stop the bus and let my friend (you guess the name) off”
          Okay, now everyone can put me on the prayer chain for repeating that… 😳

    1. Are you SERIOUS?! I think they just ASSUME that young kids wouldn’t bring alcohol. Don’t know adolescents, do they?

    1. Oh, that’s just when George was a fundie and he had a side job of writing brochures for churches.

      Oddly enough, they never caught the typos.

  20. How much you wanna bet that if a camper brought some other random item (say, a Lego Harry Potter minifig), and the camp tried to confiscate it and the kid protested, they would say that the random item is listed in the “etc.” on the “what not to bring” list.

  21. @Kitty – Woohoo! Underage drinking! 😉 Either that, or the counselors confiscate it for their nightly poker game after lights-out. Speaking of poker, surprised playing cards didn’t make it on the list. Do fundies still have hangups over a deck of cards?

    I went to camp twice: once to the Wilds in like 7th grade and once to another camp in Wisconsin a few years later. I managed to come up with a good excuse the other years. Though I do have one bright spot from that other camp. Campers there had to sing in front of everyone for their mail if they got more than three letters in the week, so my youth group ganged up on me and sent me a ton of stuff. Me and two other socially awkward kids had to sing “Old MacDonald” right before dinner. I unashamedly danced the Dirty Bird when the the chicken stanza came up and the place came unglued. I was also given several stern glares from my sponsors, but I didn’t care. That place needed to liven up a little. I earned the nickname “Dirty Bird” and was universally recognized for the rest of the week. Felt good. 😎

    1. “That place needed to liven up a little”

      Oh yes. When doing cheers for our cabin/team, we were only allowed to move up and down, not sideways.

  22. My sister and I were both sent to Fundy camp one summer after we joined a Fundy church. I was in junior high, she was in elementary school. I was already well on my way to becoming Fundy – I took notes in my Bible margins, memorized the whole list of verses (including the extra-credit ones, of course), gladly gave up my wicked Steven Curtis Chapman CDs, tossed my stick in the fire, etc. etc. My sister was not so fortunate. She HATED camp because the other kids in her cabin teased her since she went to a public school. They somehow had decided that their in-the-basement-of-the-church-with-stay-at-home-moms-for-teachers school was better than our really decent public school, so they wouldn’t let her hear the end of it. My sister never went back. The sad thing is, I don’t think she cares about Christianity at all now. They didn’t just turn her off from camp or Fundyism, they turned her away from God. 😥

    1. I’ve heard that happen all too often, and its sad.

      My sister was a fundy, but never truly in it, and I think its because she went to public school (our parents gave us a choice). She went to PCC and was a dorm sup and all of that, but even then, she was a very lenient dorm sup and let people get away with stuff all the time.

      Now, she goes to a non-denom and is happy as a peach there.

  23. http://www.lwbyc.com/

    I see shorts above the knee, on the front page no less. And this line cracked me up:

    “CULOTTES AND DRESSES MUST BE WORN TO THE KNEE. WE PREFER THESE ON GIRLS.” We prefer boys not wear culottes or dresses, but if you must, make sure they’re to the knee. 😆

    1. The website says this about boys dress.

      “BOYS CAN WEAR KNEE PANTS WHILE PLAYING BUT THEY MUST BE TO THE KNEE.”

      Gosh! All those boys sexy hairy legs. How will the girls contain themselves? 😆

  25. I went to Trinity’s Youth Camp for three years: I was very socially awkward and didn’t talk to anyone but I really liked it. I suppose it was “liberal” though, they had the words to “worship music” on large screens!! Ahhhh! My third year was fun: two of my sisters were there, our team won for the week, and I got camper of the cabin 🙂

    And I learned all of my verses: just because I could and wanted to give my team more points 😛

    Then I went to my current fundy church’s youth camp. Much prettier, but way too many rules. And the girls from the academy weren’t very nice at all: it was a new girl who was nice to me 😛

    1. At The Wilds (NC) in the 70s, you had to buy a Wilds Songbook, compiled and edited by the lovely Garlock-Hamilton team. 😯

  26. Gah! Uncomfortable flashbacks!

    This list was all fine and dandy until I was about 12. (I was a very compliant child.) After that — really?? No reading?? And how exactly was I supposed to survive a week without decent music, since they were still making us sing songs written for 6-year-olds?

  27. Well, all *I* want to know is, if I can’t bring boys with earrings with me, can I bring boys *without* earrings with me? I just want clarification, because the “To Bring” list doesn’t mention bringing non-earring-ed boys with you.

    Oh whatever, I think they’ll be fine with it…

  29. I went to church camp (there was Sky Mountain, near Lake Tahoe; then when I was in high school, we had the “conference” at Cal Poly for a week… that was a lot of fun, actually) when I was little, but I was going to a non-denom church at the time (I’m slowly distancing myself from my IFB church). We had rules similar to the ones stated in the OP, but they weren’t strictly enforced by anyone. The rules were more a list of suggestions than anything. If a kid brought along a walkman or portable cd player, or books & magazines (like Seventeen), then that was fine. Then when cell phones started becoming more mainstream, kids brought those and no one cared.

    One thing that always annoyed me, though, is that they seemed to assume little kids liked getting down and dirty, so the younger aged camp was always out in the woods with dirty cabins and gigantor black ants. I always hated that part; although as I grew older, the camps were held in nicer places (like at Cal Poly, where we got to stay in the dorms).

  30. Under the don’t bring it says “etc” after the first two lines. Is that the unwritten rule clause? We can take it away from you because we SAID you shouldn’t bring it under the “etc” rule. That’s to cover modern technology that is moving too fast for them.

  31. http://www.lwbyc.com/?page=books

    Advertising the founder’s book on prayer:

    “There is only one way a child of God can succeed in his or her prayer life, and that is to “Just Do It.” [sic] ”

    TWSS….Although, the camp regulations seem to be bent on making it impossible to Do It, esp. with the culottes and kneepants. 😳

    1. How do you know when you’ve “succeeded” at prayer?
      When that new Cadillac you’ve been praying for drops out of the sky?

  32. Don’t forget cabin cleanup and singing “pigs don’t live in houses” to the “messy” ones. What in the WORLD was wrong with us (the counselors)?

  33. I could have missed it in the whole group of posts but I didn’t see anything about the highlight of the week…throwing a stick in the bonfire…the crying and then the emotional trip home where we bond with our new friends and ignore the old ones who didn’t vow to burn their rock music when they got home.

    1. Oh…the “stick in the fire”! We made fun of that so much, they actually quit doing it. Of course, then we were the reputed group of kids they couldn’t “wait to get out of the youth group.”

  34. How about dinging “Somebody Touched Me” around the camfire? Anyone remember that, or am I showing my age? It starts out “It was on a Monday somebody touched me (repeat x2) Must have been the hand of the Lord” Each verse is a day of the week and the idea was that you stood on the day of the week when you were saved. I was saved on a Sunday as far as anybody knew, because I’d been pressured after Sunday school as a young teen to pray The Prayer. I didn’t really understand what salvation was about at the time and I was a compliant kid so I did as I was told…to everyone’s delight and for another notch in Mrs. Pastor’s belt. I actually trusted Jesus on my own in my bed at night some time later, and never took note of the day. So I had no clue when to stand other than on the verse for Sunday that was at the end of the song. Yet I felt like I was lying. Besides that particular burden of guilt, I very shy. As the verses progressed through the days of the week I could see the counselors clutching their Bibles tigher, eying the seated kids, picking out their marks like SWAT snipers and exhibiting nervous energy like that of race horses at the starting gate. Rather than be honest and try to explain my experience to some poor pizza-faced college kid lusting after a notch in her own belt, I..well…I lied and stood on Sunday. Sigh. It’s a burden I’ve carried for years.

    1. You’re not alone there. Even with the best intentions, the pressure can be overwhelming to anyone, much less a young person.

      “The Prayer” has condemned as many people to Hell as any other explicitly anti-Christ religion…and possibly with the best intentions.

      And, yeah, I sang that song around the ol’ campfire a few times. We eventually tired of it, though, and started making up our own Christian rap songs – which generally resulted in a sudden “lights out” for all those involved. :mrgreen:

    2. How does one “ding” a song! Handbell choir? Imagine THAT around a campfire! I can’t blame mistyping on George when I wrote my original post at 5 AM with one contact out. Sorry folks.

    3. I only heard that song once, but it was at a small GARBC camp during family week. I had asked Jesus to be my Savior as a very young child, so I had NO idea of the specific date, much less the exact day of the week. I felt horrible as the song continued because I didn’t know when to stand; I WANTED to stand, but I didn’t know WHEN to stand! If I stood on the wrong day, I’d be lying, but if I didn’t stand, people would think I wasn’t saved!

      I also never liked the song, “Oh, what a wonderful, wonderful day, day I will never forget, after I’d wandered in darkness a way, Jesus my Savior I met.” I met Jesus as a very little child under the daily teaching of my parents. How could I pin-point one specific day?

      1. PW – I was also saved as a small child and can’t remember the date. We had an evangelist one time come through and said, maybe you can’t remember the date, but you should be able to remember the place, made me feel somewhat better, because I did remember the place I got saved, it was in our home, and the Holy Spirit moved on alittle boy’s heart, WOW, God’s Good.

        I always liked the song though, first heard it sung by Ron Comfort (Ambassador College) and his wife when they were visiting our area forty some years ago. I don’t hear alot of negatives about Ambassador college on here but I know that Comfort was pretty kjv and fundy when I heard him.

  35. I live not-too-far-away from this very camp! My best friend and younger brother both attended as counselors last year. They seemed to enjoy it okay. My brother was bummed that he had to give up his Weezer CDs for a week, but ah well.

    On a related note, I used to attend a “Mission Institute” every year that my family was home from the mission field. It was billed as a time of training for missionaries, but in reality was a two-week long camp/revival in the furthest reaches of Mississippi where fun went to die. The written rules were bad enough, but the UNWRITTEN rules were positively arcane. My brother couldn’t kick a hacky sack in the hall because it could potentially break a thick glass pane fifty yards away. No playing any stupid hand-slapping games due to potential for injury. (Pushing each other off a balance beam in the playground in the most creatively violent manner possible was okay. It built character.) No wearing any t-shirts with Disney’s “Goofy” character on them because, and I swear I’m not making this up, “There’s nothing wrong with Goofy, but what if someone else has a t-shirt that has Goofy doing something bad on it, and then someone else takes it a step further and has a REALLY bad Goofy shirt, and then where would we be? So, no shirts with anything on them. At all.” Did I mention this Institute was run exclusively by people over 65?

    Of course, I was a prepubescent twerp back then, so, I probably didn’t even know the half of it. Darrell was in a slightly older class. I’d be interested to hear what demands were placed on him and his peers. I kind of missed that group.

  36. Without fail, on our “Camper’s List”, two things:

    1. Underneath “What to Bring” would be: “A desire to grow spiritually”. 🙄

    2. Under “What NOT to Bring” would be the words: “Bad Attitude”. Of course, that was left solely up to the discretion of whichever misguided counselor did or did not like you.

    Being the black sheep and a PK, I was never much liked by the counselors.

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