WHY WE STILL NEED CAMP MEETING

This is camp meeting season. Beginning with the second week of June and extending into the first week of July, the nine Regional Conferences will have camp meetings varying from a weekend to the old-fashioned ten-day event.

Let me confess my bias at the outset: I love camp meeting. When I was a conference president, camp meeting was my favorite thing— much to the consternation of our financial people, who were understandably concerned about its enormous cost.

And make no mistake about it; camp meeting is expensive. Even back in my day, costs ran between $250,000.00 to $300,000.00. Other conferences spend more than that. It was the single most expensive item in our budget in those days, after salary and benefits.

While I do believe how we conduct camp meeting will continue to change and evolve over time, I don’t believe these sessions will ever completely go away. But if they do, a major culprit will be the cost. The cost of transporting, housing and feeding an entire conference staff is enormous. Our costs in South Central were less because we could use the Oakwood University dormitories. We had to pay to use those dormitories but it was nowhere near the cost of having to house an entire staff in hotel rooms, as other conferences do.

And then-there are costs such as children and youth programs, and the costs of bringing in guest speakers and seminar facilitators. This generated enormous expenses in those days and I am sure they have only grown even more enormous over time.

But-I believed that the cost of camp meeting was worth it. I still believe that. Part of that comes from my background.

I grew up in a very traditional Seventh-day Adventist home. My father was the breadwinner in our family. He had a couple of weeks for vacation every year and he spent them taking his family to camp meeting. My parents did not take us to Disneyland for vacation; we went to Joyland (that was the name of the children’s tent back in the old Allegheny Conference where I grew up).

Every summer, my parents would pack up my two sisters, my brother and me, along with bedding, clothes and food for 10 days, and we would make the eight to nine-hour drive to Pine Forge for the Allegheny Camp Meeting. How my father got all of us and all of our gear in one car, without a trailer, is a mystery to me—especially after one year when I watched my wife pack for another ten-day period for a General Conference session. She took enough shoes to fill up my father’s station wagon by herself!

For the first several years, we would spend those 10 days of camp meeting, outdoors in a tent. We had a gas camping stove that my mom used to cook our meals. The tent had two beds, and somehow, my parents made them work for six people. Although the weather was hot during the day, it could get chilly at night.

Later, in the words of the old television show, The Jeffersons, we “moved on up” from a tent to the home of my parents’ friends, the late Elder and Mrs. Walter Starks (Mrs. Starks, who was a wonderful lady, just passed away at age 100). The Starks, who I believe had seven children, lived in a large house near the campus of Pine Forge. They needed a large house, because not only did we stay with them for camp meeting, so did another family. There were 20 people in that house! And we loved it. When I tell my children those stories about sleeping outside in a tent and then moving in with 20 people and how much I enjoyed all of that, they look at me as though I have two heads.

While I certainly would not want to do that again, I have great memories of those days. Meeting new people, going to the children’s tent, and later, to the youth tent.

We would hear great music, from groups like the Dale Wright Memorial Choir and the Blendwrights. As far as I am concerned, the Blendwrights invented gospel music in the Adventist Church. They were the first people I ever knew who used drums, which caused quite a stir. Drums? In the Adventist Church? For some people, the next thing they thought would happen after drums in the Adventist Church was the Mark of the Beast!

Then, there was great preaching that, even at a young age, made a lasting impression on me. Those were the days!

Camp meeting—as a child, as a youth, as a youth director and as a conference president— was about connecting with other Adventists and connecting with God. To connect with people who you had not seen since the last camp meeting and to see them again at a new camp meeting— well, that is special. There is no fellowship like Adventist fellowship and there are few things that foster Adventist fellowship like camp meeting.

In terms of connecting with God, come to early morning prayer meeting. If you have never been to an early morning service, you may not understand what I am saying. But if you have, I suspect you know exactly what I mean.

Things have changed now. Today’s parents are not nearly as willing to spend their vacations at camp meeting. That does not make them bad parents at all; just different parents, who live in a very different time, with very different options.

My parents drove almost 500 miles to go to camp meeting. My daughter turns on a computer and brings camp meeting in every single Regional Conference to her.

I took my grandson to Disney World last year. It was a very special, albeit, very expensive experience. I do not think my grandson would choose camp meeting over Disney World. When I was seven years old, I don’t think that I would have chosen camp meeting over Disney World, either.

But when I was seven, there was no Disney World. There was a Disneyland but it was across the country in California. And for someone who grew up with only one person on either side of his family—an aunt—who had ever been on a plane before, Disneyland may as well have been in a foreign land.

My grandfather never rode on a plane. My father was in his 50s when he (very reluctantly) took his first plane ride. My first plane ride came when I was in college. My grandson’s first plane ride came when he was in kindergarten; my son’s first plane ride came when he was even younger. It’s a very different world. And that means that camp meeting must be done differently and marketed differently to a different generation that has different options and different choices. My children and their peers see nothing nostalgic or beneficial about giving up their vacation time to spend 10 days in a tent. And now that I have not done that in about 50 years, spending 10 days in a tent has kind of lost its appeal for me as well!But I still see the benefit of going to camp meeting. And if you try it, I believe you will, too. t

Dana C. Edmond, Director of the Office for Regional Conference Ministry, (ORCM), is also publisher of Regional Voice Magazine.