Categories Good SOIL Jim Vitale Uncategorized February 24, 2025

Overnight camp | Pt 9: Camp Cultivates Faithfulness

By Jim Vitale

This article is part of our “Why you should send your child to overnight camp” series. The series introduction explored the current research on outcomes for overnight campers and offered a list of the most important outcomes. Here, we go more in depth with one of those outcomes.  

The mountaintop experience. That euphoric, exciting, energizing experience so often associated with summer camp. A great many campers have left camp high on the emotional, relational, and spiritual excitement that a week at camp can create. Even as a young person, I was able to notice that summer camp gave me a necessary spiritual kick-start to reinvigorate my faith and carry me (at least part-way) through the other 51 campless weeks of the year.

In their study, Sacred Playgrounds found significant indication that the faith-based camp experience has a profound impact on the faith lives of campers. That is certainly one of our goals (and core values) at Camp Mount Luther, and if you come to camp you can see for yourself all the ways spirituality is integrated into the experience.

Each week at camp is bookended by worship services. Opening campfire introduces new campers to each other and to the camp culture. And it also introduces the curriculum theme for the week, centering campers in a worshipful environment. Thursday night’s campfire provides more worship experiences focused around the theme, and Friday’s closing worship service sends campers off grounded in the spiritual lessons they’ve learned throughout the week.

In addition to these larger worship services, worship and learning are happening in other intentional gatherings at least three times a day. In the morning, campers gather for First Light, where they learn about the curriculum theme for the day and read some scripture. After dinner, campers gather for Eventide, where they have opportunities to play with and get creative with the day’s Bible story. Then, each night, cabins gather for cabin worship, a small-group worship service involving Faith5, prayer time, singing, and more scripture reading.

In addition to all the formal, intentional, programmed spiritual experiences, camp chaplains, cabin leaders, and other staff are always open and ready to have spiritual conversations with campers. Sometimes the most important spiritual experiences come when campers are talking with their cabin leader around the fire about their own personal faith experiences.

While most campers point positively to camp as a mountaintop experience, there are some who are wary of the experience—and for good reason. The mountaintop experience is often critiqued as short-lived. It is not as impactful in the long run as it would appear given it’s emotional, spiritual, and relational intensity. It is often seen as a firework, burning bright and beautiful but extinguishing almost immediately.

This is a fair critique, and so Sacred Playgrounds set out to learn whether camp is only a mountaintop experience or if there is any longevity to the formation offered at camp.

Sacred Playgrounds interviewed campers immediately following their camp experience and then several months after, to see what changed. If camp was indeed only a mountaintop experience, then there would be significant drop-off from the data gathered immediately following the camp experience and the data gathered some months later. While there was some drop off (the mountaintop experience does indeed wear off and it always will) the data also showed a significant level of retention, indicating that while camp is a mountaintop experience, it can also provide long-term formation.

In the data gathered some months after summer camp, 96% of campers agreed that camp helped them with their faith, and 94% agreed it gave them greater knowledge of God. “There were also indications” they write, “that camp participants were having more frequent conversations with their families about God and faith in the months following camp.” The desire to engage with faith activities and share their faith with others continued beyond the boundaries of the camp.

In summarizing their findings, Sacred Playgrounds writes, “The lasting outcomes clearly evident in this study included increased self-confidence, increased horizontal faith (or faith relevance), more frequent devotional practices, increased interest in church attendance, and faith conversations/practices in the home.” There is no doubt that a week at overnight camp can be impactful for the faith lives of campers, not just for the week they are at camp but beyond. Summer camp can even make your child more interested in church! As we mentioned in another article, a majority of pastors agree the summer camp experience was important in their journey to becoming clergy. Again, this is not to say that going to camp will make you a pastor, but it is to underscore that it can have a lasting impact on your faith.

 

Over these nine articles, we have made a case for the importance of overnight camp for children and youth. We hope you have found these articles edifying and informative. There is, of course, no better way to learn about camp than to come here and see for yourself. And so we encourage you to give it a try! You can register for summer camp here. If you have questions or concerns about the overnight camp experiences, please reach out to us at cml@campmountluther.org. We would love to do everything we can to help ensure that your camper has a safe, happy, fun, and formative experience here at Camp Mount Luther. We can’t wait to see you soon!

 

Read more entries in this series