Hello Friends of Camp Anderson and Life for Youth Camp It has been an incredible year and I wanted to reach out with our annual ministry update. The past 24 months have been the busiest and most productive in the history of our ministry. We have renamed our ministry from Camp Anderson Ministries, Inc. and Life for Youth Camp to ‘Realife’ and have changed our domain to www.realife.org. Our goal with the rebrand is for our name to better represent our mission. With all of our camps, outreach events, retreats, and foster care ministry, our goal and mission are that every person that we meet would experience ‘Realife’ that can only come through faith in Jesus Christ and His Gospel. We have gone from being tenants in Old Town Florida, to now being owners of three campuses! God opened the door for us to purchase the Blue Springs Convention Center in Marianna that had been ravaged by Hurricane Michael. With the help of many donors and missionary hands and hearts, we were able purchase and repair this facility and we moved our headquarters to Marianna FL. We held our first summer camp at this new facility in 2021 (which has 2 camps on the same property). Shortly after summer camp season of 2021, the Board of Directors for Life for Youth Camp (in Vero Beach Florida) approached us and offered to donate a camp property if we would implement the same Gospel centered ministry program as was present in Marianna. Our board believed that this was the will of God, so we took on this new campus and began a second summer camp location this past summer in Vero Beach. Our Marianna campus staff divided, and we sent in a mission team to Vero Beach on this new mission. All three of these campuses are staffed year-round for summer camp, outreach events for foster children, and retreat rentals. The ministry growth has been exponential! In 2020, while at the Old Town location, our capacity was around 2,500. In 2021, when we moved to the new Blue Springs facility, the summer camp ministry doubled to over 5,000 students, but our ministry growth didn’t stop there! Now in 2022, with the addition of the Vero Beach campus, we saw almost 10,000 students over the course of 9 weeks. This past summer we witnessed over 588 young people put their faith in Jesus Christ and 550 were baptized. The Stillwaters campus in partnership with FCA and other churches, saw over 200 students come to Christ. Also, through some of our other outreach events in Vero and Marianna, we have seen another 200 + students saved. For all three campuses, we have seen a total of over 1000 people saved and close to 600 baptized in 2022 as well as countless lives changed to the Glory of God! We are so thankful to God for His continued blessings, and to all of our missionary partners and donors that help to make this possible. Indeed, the fields are white unto harvest and our prayers are to the Lord of the harvest that He would send laborers into this field. Below, you can see the Campus Maps for each of the three locations. The Blue Springs and Stillwaters campuses are on the same property in Marianna, Florida and the Vero Beach campus is in Southeast Florida. Click Here for Realife
Vero Beach Video! Click Here for Realife Blue Springs Video! Click Here for Stillwaters at Blue Springs Video!
Currently we are entering a construction cycle to build a new foster care landing camp at the Marianna campus. This has been a calling and a dream of ours for many years to provide a Christian landing camp for kids that are coming into the foster care system. We believe that these kids in the foster system are the neediest in our society as they are what the Bible calls the ‘fatherless’. We know that they are closest to the heart of God, and we are compelled to reach them with the Gospel and the absolute best of everything that the Christian community can provide. It is our vision to help connect these kids with Christian ‘Forever Families’.