When you spend as much time in church as families like ours did – which is to say, every moment of every day you weren’t at home or in school or shopping – you need recreational institutions that don’t compromise the hermetic social seal around you. When it comes to summer activities, we note that heathen children often go to summer camp, returning after weeks of tremendous fun with their accumulated rock collections and sun blisters and pen pals. Us Evangelical kids were no different: we had church camp.
You, my gentle reader, might be tempted to recall Jesus Camp, the award-winning 2006 documentary that painted the institution in such an unflattering light. While it’s true that the evolution of Evangelicalism in the decades since my youth may indeed have skewed church camp in that unfortunate direction, I can say unequivocally that when I was a kid, there was nothing sinister or insidious about it. It was great fun, and I looked forward to it every summer. In fact, there were summers when I went more than once.
Blue Grass Christian Assembly
My first foray was in 1969, when my family lived in Lexington, Kentucky. But I wasn’t a camper on that occasion; I was there as my father’s little sidekick. My dad was the dean for that week’s camp session, which is to say he was the guy visibly in charge of the proceedings.
I was eight, while the campers that week were teenagers. What I noted, for the very first time, was my dad’s easy way with young people. Back in an era when the men of the church were white-shirt-and-thin-black-tie-wearing authoritarians with permanent scowls, my father was the congenial, turtleneck-wearing cool-uncle type. He was as friendly with the campers and faculty and camp staff as could be, with a perpetual smile and a way of setting everyone at ease. In the activities he personally led, he stirred enthusiasm and encouraged participation.
Here’s how church camp works: like heathen camp, there are gender-bifurcated dormitories where everyone gets to sleep in a bunk bed. Bathrooms are communal. There’s a spacious, raucous dining hall where everyone congregates three times a day for noisy meals punctuated with song and laughter and the occasional flinging of food. There’s a swimming pool and a baseball field and a basketball court and hiking trails. There’s a canteen where sodas and snacks can be found.
There are activities like craft-making and nature walks and sports. The faculty and staff facilitate all of this with an atmosphere of patience and spirited encouragement and inclusiveness. The sullen homesick child is usually coaxed into enjoying himself, and new friendships spring up like dandelions.
The only substantive difference between church camp and heathen camp is that the songs are praise choruses, and there a few spiritually-minded “classes”, I suppose we’d call them, where we’d break up into groups in the morning and afternoon as a faculty member would share something Jesus-minded and we would be encouraged to comment. Sometimes it was Bible study, sometimes just an Evangelical talking point. And in the evening, there would be “vespers”, a kind of tranquil prayer meeting not unlike what we might imagine Thomas Merton experiencing after dinner.
Inevitably, there would be baptisms in the swimming pool on the final night of camp. Inevitably, there would be hugs and tears the next morning as parents took up retrieval operations.
On my first week, I participated in little of this. I was eight years old, and the week was formatted for teenagers. I spent this time exploring, primarily.
Let me tell you a little about this particular camp, Blue Grass Christian Assembly, located about 10 miles southeast of Lexington on Athens-Boonesboro Road. It is a beatific, tucked-away-from-the-world tract of heaven nested in quiet woods, next to a broad creek with roaring six-foot waterfall. Its signature feature is the dining hall, an edifice of stone and worn-down wood that looks like an 18th-century tavern. That building had a smell like no other – rural and oaken and ancient, yet warm and homey and welcoming.
I explored the edges of the woods and broke my own rock-skipping record many times. And the exploration didn’t end there; I discovered something else I’d never truly seen so up-close before.
Teenage girls.
Up to this point in my young life, I’d never been around teenage girls. Oh, our church had its fair share, of course, but I was never anywhere near them.
Here, however, up-close was all there was. And I got more attention from them than I would later receive as an actual teenager. I was just the cutest thing!!! I got to sit with them in the dining hall and they made much of me and called me Scotty and Scotty-poo and Little Lukey (church camp kids always called my father “Lukey”). They practically fought over me!
If my dad noticed this attention I was getting, he ignored it. Being a dad myself now, I suppose it’s no reach to assume a certain pride, under the circumstances. In any case, I loved the attention, and more than that, the freedom to be excused for having no idea what to say or how to act around older women.
They were, in a word, mesmerizing. They were gorgeous! They were fun! They had boobs!!! And, wow – they smelled sooooo good!
Needless to say, I was all-in.
Georgia
The following year, the church camp was in central Georgia, in the countryside not far from East Point, where my father had taken on a new congregation. Once again, I was dad’s sidekick, as he deaned during a teenager week. It was just like the previous year, only better – these teenagers were very musical, the guys hauling out acoustic guitars and the girls singing with solo-quality gusto. I remember in particular a spontaneous dining hall outburst of alternate lyrics to “Do You Know the Way to San Jose”, rechristened “Do You Know the Way to Cabin Four” - one of the girls’ dorms, where certain male campers had been spotted.
Paradoxically, my dad had more time for me on that particular week, and we did some of the activities as a team. This was a rare treat; my dad had been a very busy guy all my young life, and the only activity we’d ever really shared was Indian Guides, a sort of father-son Boy Scout analog sponsored by the YMCA. There was a trade-off, of course; more time in dad’s presence meant less time seeking out boobs to stare at - but I was grateful for the attention, all the same.
Hanging Rock
Another year, another church. Our family moved to Crawfordsville, Indiana, where the local church camp was Hanging Rock Christian Assembly. This year – my 10th - I was finally a camper. And dad wasn’t around.
If church camp had been glorious before, it ascended to a whole new level of nirvana this time around. With no dad, I suddenly found myself free of the scrutiny that I’d always worn like an itchy sweater; I was no longer Little Lukey, and the only people who had any idea I was a PK were the other campers from my church.
I took to calling myself Chip, a name lifted from the TV show My Three Sons. The other kids from my home church rolled their eyes at this, but it was more than just self-indulgent fun; I reveled in the opportunity to be someone else.
And I reveled in the opportunity to be around girls who didn’t know me as the preacher’s son, girls who called me Chip, girls who saw me as casually as they saw all the other guys. Now, it wasn’t quite the same as being made much of by 17-year-old knockouts, but it was much better than the mundane invisibility I experienced routinely at school and church.
And it was there, that week, that I had a girlfriend for the first time ever.
Her name was Mary Bock, and she had brown hair and was shorter than average. She had a quick wit and a veneer of skepticism that made me wonder if she was at camp voluntarily.
She lived in Roachdale, a community that would become famous the following year when a mysterious predator slaughtered hundreds of chickens in a succession of midnight massacres, and was filled with interesting observations. We spent as many hours as we could away from the other campers in private conversation.
The name “Hanging Rock” derived from a rock formation down by the creek near the camp, across from which was a cliff with a huge indentation. Protruding from the indentation was a geologically curious, inexplicable cone that, to me, always appeared awkwardly penile. But no one ever sought my opinion on this.
Returning from vespers at the hanging rock on the final night of camp, Mary and I held hands. That was a lifetime first for me.
I looked her up on Facebook a few years ago.
More Hanging Rock
The next few summers were a wonderful blur. Each year I’d return to Hanging Rock, sometimes more than once, and each year I had as much fun as any pre-teen could stand. I continued to be Chip, I always made new friends, and I always enjoyed a social status that starkly contrasted with my wallflower reality back home – a status that was independent of my father and family.
One consequence of this was the opportunity to discover, and subsequently release, my inner asshole. I had been learning for years, through careful observation, that the true alpha males had a knack for dining hall jokes and pranks, that making other kids laugh was a path to popularity and the approval of females. So I began to experiment.
The best year was 1975, when I was 14. This was the summer of “Love Will Keep Us Together” and “Listen to What the Man Says” and “The Hustle” and “One of These Nights”. It was a magical week, made all the better by the presence of Ken Henderson, a Christian speaker who cultivated a ministry to youth that was seasoned with hilarious poetry; and by Kurt, a young preacher-to-be who was there as a counselor, who took me under his wing. I remember his morning Bible study admonition that we say “gender” rather than “sex” when referring to our opposites, lest our minds wander where they shouldn’t. I turned the tables on him with some inner asshole later, when he was cautioning us of the dangers of extramarital sex.
“Extramarital gender,” I corrected him in front of everyone.
Heathen camp tapers off in the pre-teens and early teens, for obvious reason: if you’ve got 16- and 17-year-olds gathered together in large groups there’s gonna be a whole lotta sex going on in the woods. It’s a perfect recipe for adolescent mating: hormones surging, far from home, no parents, the excitement of new faces, supervisory adults spread thin, surrounded by romantic forest paths and summer moonlight – if heathen camp extended to the late teens, it would generate 2 or 3 babies per camp per week.
Church Camp, not so: whatever its similarities to heathen camp, church camp is also an indoctrination tool; it exists to get kids out of the house in the summer, to be sure, but it is also there to reinforce bedrock Fundamentalist principles of Authoritarian acquiescence, subordination to an astringent patriarchal code, and an assumed female submission. These things were never openly spoken of, it’s true; but as opposed to the benign Follow the Rules edict that lent structure to heathen camp, church camp was rigidly ensconced in an intractable, non-negotiable grating of This Is How We Live.
The best we could do, then, was sneak kisses here and there.
Her name was Pam Reed, and she was from across the border, in Champagne, Illinois. She had long red hair and a stunning figure (as stunning as it gets at 14) and I was nuts about her the first day. We began sitting together at meals and activities, and took walks at every opportunity. We had a lot to discuss – shared youthful disillusionment, discomfort within our own families, and how all of our teachers in school back home were kind of dumb. She was so gorgeous, I have trouble in retrospect understanding how I managed to remember my mother tongue in her presence - but she seemed utterly oblivious to the fact that she was a knockout. She was brilliant, she was open, and she spoke frankly, and all of that took precedence.
Kurt overheard one of my friends mentioning her, and asked me to point her out. I did.
“Ah,” he nodded, “the healthy one.”
And on the final night of camp, behind the girls’ dorm, I kissed her. To this day, 45 years later, I remember every last detail. She smelled sooooo good...
That was my first kiss.
I loved Hanging Rock so much, I went back later that summer as a groundskeeper. I got paid $25.
Return to Blue Grass
In 1976, our family returned to Kentucky, settling in Frankfort. I was signed up to return to Blue Grass, finally as a camper – until a disastrous haircut left me so rattled that my mom said I didn’t have to go. By the following summer – the summer of Star Wars – I had made many friends back home at Franklin County High School, and was smitten with a girl there named Ann, to whom I sent post cards from camp. I spent no time at camp ogling, and didn’t pursue a camp fling. Instead, I enjoyed the company of old friends from dad’s Sixties church, whom I’d been in Sunday School with so long ago. We became the camp clowns, teasing selected faculty members and acting out shamelessly during dining hall meals.
Several memories stand out. One was a surprise visit from Dan Issel, then a hero of Kentucky basketball, who had been a star at UK and gone on to play for the Kentucky Colonels and the Denver Nuggets. Another was the presence of a stunning male vocal quartet from Milligan College, a Christian liberal arts school in Tennessee, who performed a capella every night. I had already come to love this kind of music, and started a group just like it the following year at FCHS with my friends Gordon and Gus and Tom.
And that was it. I never did another year of church camp. Instead, I went to Christian youth conferences on college campuses, a change instituted by my parents to nudge me in the direction of attending one.
I would, over the years, occasionally visit a church camp to perform. I was never a dean or a counselor, and only one of my own kids ever went to such a camp (my oldest son, Steve, whom I baptized myself in the camp pool on the last night – I think that was 1996).
I’m not overflowing with fond memories of my earlier years in the Evangelical world – but church camp was a joyous exception, filled with happy firsts, the one place where I could be more than the kid I was back home.
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