Going Home..... well one of the homes

The first time I went to Camp....

 Have you ever noticed that there are some places that are always home? A place that, as soon as you arrive something just feels right?

For me one of those places is Camp Maskepetoon, along the north shore of Pigeon Lake. I went as a camper three time as a child and enjoyed myself greatly. I still have some very clear memories of wide games, of sleeping at outback, of the ghost story The Claw (which we were told the night before going to sleep at outback in 1980--probably not the best timing). I remember a talent show in 1981. I remember campfire singing (where I first learned to sing with glee about the sinking of the Titanic) and telling stories and jokes when we were probably supposed to be singing. We had great times.

Then 8 years later, in my second year of university, I was looking for a summer job. As an Education student I was looking for something that might be slightly career oriented. In the job centre in the Student Union Building was a listing for staff positions at Camp Maskepetoon and I thought it sounded good so I applied to be the Devotions Director. I got an interview (and can still name the three people who interviewed me 37 years later) and was offered the position.

Realistically, I had no idea what I was doing. I certainly had no idea that my  life was about to be changed. It was just a summer job....right?

Cooking at camp
can be...different

I had a great summer. I went back the next year in the same job. Then ended up going back to work in the kitchen for a third summer at camp. Took a few years off, working summer jobs at a golf course clubhouse (which was great, good people but not the same). Then I needed something for another summer and applied to work in the kitchen again. Did that for 2 years.

Then was asked to be on the Board, which I did for three years before going off to finish my degree and start my career. While on the Board I helped hire three sets of staff. And because I had three days or four days off in a row every week (one of the blessings of shift work) I spent LOTS of time out at the lake visiting, singing, and helping with whatever needed to be done.

Camp changed me. Camp changed my life direction. If it hadn't been for those first 2 summers I might not have started to feel called to ministry. But it was more than that.

I made friends at that place. Friends that I have not seen for years but in June when we all gathered for a reunion the connection was still there. I grew spiritually at that place. Eveneings standing on the beach staring at the lake and the sky, nights at outback sitting around the fire, the (sort of) stillness of sitting in one of many canoes as the whole camp group canoes across the  lake. Times that opened my heart and soul.

These were times of laughter. Times of hijinks == the time we hung a bunk in a tree, or the day in 1999 when I came out of the cabin to find that my car (which I had foolishly left the keys in) had been moved to the middle of the cabin area and mummified in saran wrap. There were games played, hiding in the bush, chasing each other around the sports field. It was a place where we were invited to be free to be who we really were. In a time of my life where I had few places where I felt really comfortable Camp stands out as that place. At camp I was free to make a fool of myself (arguably something that came naturally). Before camp I would never have seen myself leading campfire songs.

I would never have thought I might offer the first car I ever owned up for redecoration.

Many years later I moved back to Alberta. My daughters became old enough to go as campers. I convinced them to give it a try -- which was an easy sell as they had experienced church camping before -- and every year as we turned into the driveway to drop them off my heart sang. We always got there early enough to have time to walk around the site before leaving however many of them were staying that week/ I wanted, no needed, to walk around this sacred place, to sit on the campfire benches, to walk down to the chapel. Just to be there for that 45 minutes gave me some renewal.

ANd it worked again. this summer two daughters are on staff (one for the 4th summer) and one is volunteering. For some of us camp seeps into your bones and draws you back.

At the reunion for the 70th anniversary last month I was asked to say a few words about what camp meant to me. The first word that came to my mind was HOME. Wherever I go that place will go with me. Later this summer I am going to spend a week as Camp Dad and general helper. I look forward to seeing what a week at camp looks like now and how it is both the same and different as when I spent all those days there long ago.

If you get a chance to experience church camp ministry TAKE IT. Just be aware that it might affect you more than you expected.

Book Review: From Social Media to Social Ministry: A Guide to Digital Discipleship

 

From Social Media to Social Ministry: A Guide to DigitalDiscipleship By Nona Jones ©2020 Zondervan Press 176 pages.

When it comes to being a hybrid church or finding new ways to be church in an online world we have to move beyond Sunday morning. Much of the time we stop there, thinking streaming worship is enough. But if we are considering how these tools might support, for example, a church who has trouble convincing a clergy person to move to town or can not afford full-time ministry, we have to ask how the rest of the work of the community can be fed/supported/nurtured online. So I was really looking forward to this book that promised to move beyond the live stream.

I was somewhat disappointed, more on that later.

In this short little volume Jones pushes the reader to see Social Media in ways beyond merely another advertising tool to get people to attend in-person events/activities. She reminds us that community can be built online as well. It won’t be the same but it is real. This is something many of us struggled with during the early stages of Covid-19 as we were barred from gathering in-person. How could we be a community without being together in the same space?

In the post-lockdown world the question still lingers. Jones would likely point out that some had started to embrace that question long before March 2020. For a variety of reasons there are some people who prefer (or are only able) to join a community in virtual/online space. How can we make that a full experience of community? I note that she also works (or worked not sure of timelime) for Facebook and much of the book is explicitly talking about how to use Facebook for social ministry. It started to feel a bit like an ad for Facebook at times. This was one of the disappointments.

Disappointing as it might have been, I think Jones raises several good points about what is needed to create a true ministry presence online. I think she is right about the limitations of many platforms to create a safe place for building community and relationships. I am less certain that Facebook is as good for it as she claims (and am relatively certain it might be getting worse as AI slop invades the atmosphere). It is a real challenge to see Social Media as something other than an advertising tool.

The other disappointment I had in the book was that it was treating the online space as creating a separate campus for a church, in the same way that a large church might set up a second (or third or fourth) physical location. With this approach the online church starts to need a whole staffing/support structure that many churches can not (or will choose not to) provide. A small church with one (or no) pastor or staff that wants to create an online side to the community will not be able to designate a pastor for that part of the community. Much of the discussion of how to move from social media to social ministry seemed to assume a much larger church structure than many readers would have.

Still I want to know how we use online tools to build a community, either as a stand-alone or more likely as an adjunct part of the in-person community. How can we use online tools (be that Facebook pages and groups, Zoom, Instagram, or...) to facilitate community building, spiritual growth, Christian Education, stewardship/opportunities to serve as well as Sunday worship? How can online ministry help the church that has no pastor, or the one who only has a pastor onsite half-time? This book raised good issues and questions. It is sorting out those learnings from the sales pitch on one (plausibly one very good) answer that is the challenge I need to meditate on some more.

Book Review Both/And: Maximizing Hybrid Worship Experiences for In-Person and Online Engagement

 

Both/And: Maximizing Hybrid Worship Experiences for In-Person and Online Engagement By Jason Moore. ©2022 Invite Press 204 pages

This book grew out of the reality of COVID-19 and the changes pushed on churches by the lock down. Of course many places had been doing some form of hybrid worship long before March 2020 but many of us were suddenly pushed to do worship differently in that month. And then as the world moved into the later stages of the pandemic many of us decided (either intentionally or by default – more on that later) to continue with some form of hybrid worship. Whether we were/are doing it well might be a whole other question.

In fact that is one of the questions I brought with me into Sabbatical, which is why this volume ended up on my reading list. I am instinctively convinced that hybrid worship needs to mean more than simply streaming what happens in the sanctuary on Sunday morning, but am not entirely sure what I think needs to be done differently. I was hoping this book would help me sort that out.

It did and it didn’t.

Moore affirms my thoughts that we need to do things differently. He draws out questions and concerns that had not occurred to me and ones that had but not at a conscious level. At the same time, many of the suggestions he presents for how to do things differently seem like they only work within specific worship structures, with a bigger volunteer/staff team, and with far different technology than some of us work with. So the questions were good. The suggestions made logical sense. The challenge is how to adapt them to the context (worship style, team size/expertise/comfort, technology available) where one is.

One of the key pieces I took from the book was the idea that we are serving different audiences. We have the people who are in the room. We have the committed church folk who, for a variety of reasons, who are not in the room but are on-line instead. We have the people who are using the livestream as a way to check us out, to test this as a possible faith community. We have those who drifted away, or left more intentionally, who are wondering about coming back. There are probably more subsets as well. We also have the reality that some will join online as the service is happening, and some will join when their schedule fits better. How do we build hybrid worship that meets these various needs? How do we make all feel welcomed, included as participants rather than observers? How do we keep them engaged? What language opens or closes doors? What pieces work really well on screen but not in the room, and vice versa? In the end it becomes an inclusivity question.

Another piece that kept occurring to me, particularly early in the book, was that maybe improving the experience for the online side of the hybrid worship equation will improve it for the in-person side as well. Maybe that hit me because it ties in to my ongoing pondering of “does our current worship order actually work?” (or maybe who does it work for and who doesn’t it). Can worship (on-line and in-person) be more interactive and participatory? How? Changing worship is always a bit of a tightrope to walk, but worship styles/patterns need to evolve and change over time.

Then there was the key question, the one many of us may not have spent much time on. Why are we doing hybrid worship? There are lots of answers to this. There are also people who, in 2022/23 were saying “OK we can stop now so all those people will come back”. It is possible that we need to talk about why we see the need/why we are called to be hybrid churches (or the reverse) as we move forward into a new era. I appreciated Moore’s suggestion that one of the reasons for hybrid worship is as a way of living out the Great Commandment, seeing it as much as outreach as service to the current members of the community.

It is my belief that the church of the future will need to be a hybrid church. This is about worship and about everything else we do. Generally speaking we (clergy and laity alike) have been well-trained to be church in one way. We need to learn a new way. There are churches that are primarily (or only) on-line. That is not what most of us are looking for. We need to figure out how to be Both/And.