Happy birthday, Church Camp!

A year ago today a little book about a place called camp and a bit of theology and a spiritual evolution that happened along the way came into this world. It’s a story that those who once called the evangelical world home, who later left the evangelical world, really, really get — and those who are still in the evangelical world or who never called it home in the first place don’t really (really) get.

The book has prompted numerous conversations at churches and bookstores, in backyards and living rooms and on podcasts too. A couple of weeks ago, while camping at Pinnacles with the family and a favorite auntie of the boys, I was walking Rufus down the road when a woman called out my name. She’d been at one of those backyard events in Bellingham, Washington last May; together with a dear friend who is also a therapist specializing in spiritual trauma, we led this motley crew of humans (including that woman) through a time of holding the both/and nature of loving and leaving a place like camp — of a place like camp that is at once everything to you and then a place where you no longer belong, where former beliefs no longer fit.

Because as readers eventually realize, Church Camp is about church camp, sure, but it’s also a story of deconstruction and of writing a new story and maybe even of embracing a belonging that is bigger than ourselves.

I hope you’ll pick up a copy if you haven’t already, but in the meantime, enjoy this most-read aloud section I think really gets to the heart of the book.

When the three of us1 each went our separate ways, to our respective areas of work, I kept thinking about what it means to return to a place and a people so formative in my faith journey, so critical to my personal identity. I am not the same person I was when I first stepped onto the grounds of camp or even when I kept coming back for more, five, ten, fifteen years later.

Libby became my respite at odd hours throughout the day. Want to go on another walk, Libby? Want to go explore, Libby?2 We do not venture to anything I’ve not explored a thousand times before. The hills are harder on my knees, but the bay laurels and the Douglas firs, the willow trees up at the top of the property and the redwoods down below are all the same. The eleven-mile-an-hour signs are the same. The Wagon Wheel and the campfire pit and the zip line where I dressed in Americana red, white, and blue and threw watermelons to the ground while Lenny Kravitz’s “American Woman” played in the background are all the same too.

As Libby and I stood in that place, surrounded by a tower of trees, swallowed up by different shades of green and brown and gray, I thought of a song we sang to campers each night before they went to bed:

May the Lord, mighty God, bless and keep you forever. Give you peace, perfect peace, courage in every endeavor. Lift up your eyes and see His face, filled with grace and love. May the Lord, mighty God, bless and keep you forever.

The same God I met as a summer staffer in 1998 was still there. That same God was still in me, for that same God was still present in that place. Maybe the truth is this: even if and when and as we change, even as we evolve and tear down and reconstruct new versions of faith, we are found enveloped in a Mystery who meets us in that place, who looks over us with grace and love.

Even if this God now sings a more nongendered version of the song, this same God still sings a goodnight prayer over each one of us. Even if we are sometimes left with more questions than answers, we remember the wild sameness of God—of a God who was always so much more expansive and inclusive and welcoming than we could have ever imagined. Even when, even if, we once fully found ourselves invested in rules of white evangelicalism, the God that was there, in those places called camp twenty-five years ago, is the same God that’s in the places we call camp today.3

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Thanks for being on this wild ride with me! I’ll be back to regular postings next week, but I wanted to say thank you and cheers and let’s keep doing this thing called life.

You belong,

c.

PS: If you read and loved Church Camp, she definitely needs some positive reviews over on Goodreads. Haters gonna hate over on that platform, and well, they’re hating.