Around 1895, a senior deputy at the U.S. Patent Office resigned because he believed there was nothing left to invent. Everything that could be invented had already been invented.
About the same time, Thomas Edison was in Paris demonstrating the phonograph. Some of the prominent scientists of the day insisted that a machine capable of reproducing the human voice was impossible. Edison, they said, was a fraud — a ventriloquist somehow throwing his voice. To prove their point, they grabbed him by the throat and started squeezing. The phonograph kept right on playing.
We laugh at those men now. Then most of us go on making our own little boxes for God. We put Him in one, tie it up neatly, and set it on a shelf where He will not cause us any trouble. But God has never been very cooperative about staying in the boxes we make for Him. He insists on being who He is.
A Camp Farthest Out is what happens when people take that seriously enough to try it. The experiment has been going on for the better part of a century, and it is still going on. Camps meet across North America every year, and you can go to one.
Who Was Glenn Clark?
Glenn Clark was a college professor at Macalester College and the school’s football and track coach. He was also a man who came to believe that God really did answer prayer — not simply in the old formula of yes, no, or wait, where “no” often seems to be the practical result. Glenn Clark expected God to answer the things he brought to Him, and he found that He did.
He had not always lived that way. Seven years of some of the hardest testing of his life came first. He went to Mount Soledad in California to recover from a nervous breakdown. He was far from successful. He stuttered and stammered, and his classes were so unpopular that students did not want to take them. Sitting there with the Gospels, he began to learn what it meant to live at the feet of Jesus. He came back a different man. His classes filled up. His coaching became outstanding. People with serious needs began coming to him, and they found answers.
Three things in particular had changed.
First, Clark came to see that if Jesus had made a promise and he refused to believe it, he was really treating Jesus as though He were telling tales. So he put aside his ideas about what God could or could not do and began taking the Word as it stood.
Second, he deliberately read books that pushed him beyond his own way of thinking — books about living in union with God, practicing the presence of God, and the idea that prayer operates according to laws in much the same way that physical laws govern the natural world.
Third, he began to experiment. Prayer was something he could actually put to work, almost like a lever or a wrestling hold. Put it in the right place, and something would have to move.
Eventually his students asked him to teach them how he prayed. Until they asked, he had never really tried to put it into words. Once they did, he wrote his answer down almost immediately. His students told him it was too good to keep to themselves and urged him to send it to the Atlantic Monthly. He did. “The Soul’s Sincere Desire” sold out the issue.
That was significant because, until that article appeared, the fashionable view was that prayer accomplished little beyond the personal satisfaction of communing with God.
→ Glenn Clark’s Vision For the Camps Farthest Out tells the story of the founding in full, using the words of people who were there at the beginning.
Why Is It Called a Camp and Not a Conference?
Because a conference is a place where people talk about something, while a camp is a place where they actually practice it.
Glenn Clark had coached athletes, so he understood what a training camp was supposed to do. You do not spend a week sitting around discussing your bad habits. You practice the right way until the right way becomes natural. Clark wanted something similar for what he called athletes of the Spirit, built around Jesus’ promise that where two or three agree together, He would be in the midst of them.
There was another model in his mind as well: Edison’s laboratory.
“Laboratory work was the secret. I must establish a laboratory — and what would be finer than a camp in God’s beautiful outdoors, where folks could meet and learn how to empty themselves of self, and learn how to love God with all their strength, with all their mind, with all their heart and with all their soul.”
He wanted something very specific. He wanted people to stop merely talking of and about God and the Kingdom. Those little prepositions mattered to him because they suggested distance. He wanted people to become immersed in God and His Kingdom instead.
That is why criticism was not permitted. In their sharing, campers were to look for the good in themselves and in one another rather than concentrating on what was wrong. One of the early campers described the effect of that rule as almost magical in the way it released people.
The camps were not intended to be stiff or “churchy.” People could try different things as long as what they were doing expressed the spirit of Christ — love and harmony. Problems began to dissolve. Some disappeared suddenly; others took time, just as improvement does for an athlete. People discovered abilities they had not known were there. Old habits began to fall away.
One camper described the experience as a foretaste of heaven. Anyone who has experienced a good camp understands why.
What Actually Happens in a Prayer Group?
There is less talking than you might expect, and that is intentional.
I once kept a one-page handout folded into the manuscript of one of my sermons. It contained the rules a camp prayer group had agreed to follow. It is one of the clearest descriptions of these small groups I have ever found, and I did not want to lose it.
The group honored one another by arriving on time, by praying either silently or aloud, by keeping everything shared within the group sacred and confidential, and by continuing to think of one another with goodwill between meetings.
They honored God by recognizing that listening to Him is at least as important as talking to Him, and perhaps more important. They thought of Jesus as a silent member of the group. They allowed the simplicity, naturalness, and orderliness of the Holy Spirit to set the tone.
Then came the things they agreed not to do, and that is where much of the discipline lies.
Nobody was to dominate the group, including the leader. There was to be no discussion, no problem-solving, no diagnosis, no argument, and no description of people’s injuries. There were to be no personal narrations — God already knows the details. No negative thinking. No repetition. The silences were to be respected, as was every person’s right to say nothing at all.
And nobody was assigned a turn to pray aloud. You prayed aloud when the Holy Spirit stirred you to do so.
Silence meant becoming as still as you could, listening as carefully as a child listening for its mother’s voice, resting in the presence of God, and communing with Him in peace.
→ God’s Going to Get It Done In You! is the sermon that handout was folded into, and it describes one of these groups at work at the Nebraska camp.
What Is Prayer Preparation For?
For the simple fact that people come to a prayer group with very different ideas about prayer.
Some people are uncomfortable praying for more than a few minutes. Meditators and intercessors may be perfectly happy spending hours in prayer. Some people listen and hear God speak. Others are talkers who have trouble stopping long enough to listen because silence makes them uncomfortable.
All of them may end up in the same prayer group. The leader’s first responsibility is not to assume that everyone is going to pray in the same way.
Glenn Clark called the prayer times laboratories, and that is what he meant. Campers were supposed to experiment. There is no single formula for prayer, so you try things. Some of them work. Some of them do not.
I think of a high-school chemistry experiment we once did to make hydrogen gas. We had the teacher’s permission, and we also had the good sense to hide behind something for protection. When the experiment was over, pieces of the apparatus were scattered all over the room. We laughed about it. It was fun.
Not every experiment succeeds. That does not make the experiment worthless. You learn by doing something, often more than you would learn by simply reading about it.
Most of us also need help learning to let go in faith, and sometimes a point of contact makes that possible. Glenn Clark tells of a woman who could not release her physical afflictions. There was a picture of Jesus on the wall. He had her imagine herself as the woman with the issue of blood, the woman who knew that if she could only touch the hem of Jesus’ garment, she would be well. She reached out and touched the hem in the picture, and she was healed.
Preparation is also about safety. Most people are not eager to let other people inside their defenses. We have all been hurt, embarrassed, or laughed at enough times to become cautious.
A prayer group is a place where people learn the principles involved — relinquishment, surrender, forgiveness, expectancy, trust, and agreement. They learn that silence is acceptable. They learn that they do not have to share everything. They learn that agreeing silently with another person’s prayer is real prayer.
And nothing encourages people quite like hearing about prayers that have been answered.
→ Expectancy and the Glory of God and Meditation by Starr Daily are both examples of camp teaching on these two sides of prayer — what you are expecting, and how to become still enough to listen.
Why Does Intercession Have to Stay at the Center?
Because the pattern runs through the Old Testament, the New Testament, and American history. Again and again, great movements of God have been preceded by people praying — often for hours, usually without anybody else knowing they were doing it.
When prayer disappears, something important disappears with it.
My own denomination provides the example I know best. John Wesley never set out to create a denomination. Through much prayer, he came to the assurance that God loved him and that he had been redeemed by the blood of the Lamb. The news was too good to keep to himself.
When churches closed their doors to him, he preached in fields to laborers and the poor. As people responded, the church that grew around that work had to be organized to care for them.
The Camps Farthest Out began in much the same way. They were prayed into existence, and Glenn Clark made one rule especially clear: there was to be no camp without prayer first.
That is why I would put a warning here for anyone who cares about the future of CFO. A short prayer followed by human planning is not the same as hours of intercession. And when council rings become primarily committees, CFO has lost something essential. It is like King Saul refusing to wait for Samuel and offering the sacrifice himself. That cost Saul the kingdom.
Take prayer out of the center of a camp and eventually the camp will lose its life. At best, it becomes another church camp with better food.
My remedy is not complicated. Let the United Prayer Tower do what it was built to do. Insist that council rings remain intercessory prayer groups before they become anything else. Then encourage every council ring to help its campers connect with prayer cells after camp. Modern technology makes that much easier than it once was.
And let me borrow an illustration from Field of Dreams. A man hears a voice telling him to build a baseball diamond in his cornfield, while everyone around him can give him perfectly sensible reasons not to do it. He builds it anyway.
If a camp will give itself to prayer and to living and praying in the Kingdom, the people will come. Finances, numbers, and leadership belong to God. Our job is to build the Kingdom in the camps.
What About Everybody Who Cannot Get to a Camp?
They may be among the most important people in the whole organization, and Glenn Clark understood that early.
My boyhood hero was a man who fought no battles and invented nothing. Jonathan Chapman was born in Massachusetts in 1774 and spent his life carrying apple seeds west so that pioneers could have orchards and sweet fruit instead of bitter wild apples.
He traveled down the Ohio by canoe with two loads of seed and returned again and again to the Pennsylvania cider mills for more. He went barefoot and dressed in rags, sometimes wearing a tin kettle on his head for a cap. He kept bees and gave the honey away because, as he saw it, the bees had never charged him for it.
After eating with a settler’s family, he might stretch out on the floor, take out his Bible, and read them what he called news fresh from heaven.
Behind him, hundreds of acres of Ohio would eventually bloom pink in the spring. People called him Johnny Appleseed. He blessed an entire frontier by doing what he could with what was in his hands.
Then there is the parable from which the idea of the fanner bees gets its name, taken from an old English journal.
Two men are standing beside a hive on a midsummer night when they hear a sound from inside like waves moving in and out. The old beekeeper explains that they are fanner bees. Their job is to keep the hive sweet and fresh.
They stand with their heads lowered toward the center of the hive and beat their wings until they become almost a gray mist. They draw the bad air out through one side of the entrance while fresh air is pulled in through the other. When the beekeeper bends down with a lighted candle, the current of air from the bees’ wings blows it out.
Then he asks: Is that not how Christians ought to live? If there were enough fanners, and they were as faithful to their work as those bees, would the great hive of the world not become sweet?
Glenn Clark had already been troubled by the needs around him when his attention was drawn to another group — the army of shut-ins. These were older people who believed their lives were finished and that all they could do was wait, along with invalids who desperately wanted some way for their lives to count.
And a thought came to him: here are the greatest unused resources of America. The richest storehouses of potential possibilities are these people who think their lives are of the least account.
He pointed out that Jesus had specifically included such people in the Beatitudes.
Then he told them about Bannockburn. At a critical moment in the battle, when the outcome hung in the balance, the boys, old men, and cripples who had been left behind to care for the Scottish camp picked up pikes and poles and whatever flags they could find and marched out to see what was happening.
The English saw dust rising on the horizon and pennons waving in the distance. They assumed a fresh Scottish army was arriving and fled.
Clark’s invitation was simple:
“Won’t you join me in the greatest crusade ever undertaken in America — the greatest because we want to keep it so humble and so invisible? We want to recruit all the shut-ins in America, people who think their lives are of little or no account, into a great silent army of fanner bees.”
That invitation is still open, and it costs nothing to accept.
God, here I am. I’m volunteering. I’ll start praying for the people you bring to my remembrance, beginning now.
What Is All of It Actually For?
It is not really about technique, and it is not about having an unusual experience. The hunger a camp exists to meet is much older than any of its methods: the hunger to be loved and to know that God loves you.
Everything else grows out of that. A person who knows he is loved can begin to love other people, and when that happens, the miraculous begins to take place around him.
Joy was there from the beginning.
Read Proverbs 8 as a word study, and the Wisdom speaking there is the pre-incarnate Christ, present before the depths and the mountains, daily the Father’s delight, rejoicing always before Him. Creation was a joyful thing — a dancing, singing, shouting joy. To picture the Father without that joy is to make Him smaller than He is.
None of this is available on any other terms. Glenn Clark’s own sincere desire was taken from Isaiah 32 — to be like the shadow of a great rock in a weary land — and no amount of training can make a person that kind of shelter for someone else.
The camps train people to take Jesus at His word. And the reason His word can be trusted is that He bought the right to give it with His own blood and came out of the grave to make it good.
Take a week to discover that in the company of people who mean it, and you will not be the same afterward.
That is all a Camp Farthest Out has ever claimed.
→ God’s School of Prayer is the closest thing in this library to a camp in written form.
Could You Go to One?
Yes. That is the reason I am writing this page.
The Camps Farthest Out did not end with Glenn Clark. CFO still meets across North America, year after year. You can find out where and when the camps are gathering at cfonorthamerica.org.
What you would be walking into is not a conference. Nobody sits in rows for a week simply being talked at. You would be part of a prayer group small enough for people to learn your name, and you would take part in prayer times that are treated as laboratories. You are expected to try things, including things that do not work. That is what a laboratory is for.
Criticism is not part of the sharing. And you may find, as the first campers did, that talents and abilities you never knew you had begin to surface once you are in an atmosphere where people are not judging you.
Above all, you would be among people who mean it. That is the part that cannot be put into a brochure.
One of the first campers described the people who came to that very first camp as lost, unsuccessful or unhappy, needing to have our feet placed on the road to life. It has never stopped being a good description of the people for whom these camps were built.
If you recognize yourself in that sentence, you may find that the camp was built with you in mind.
I spent a lifetime in these camps, and much of what is on this website came out of them. Almost everything I know about prayer I learned in a camp prayer group, from people who expected God to answer and were not embarrassed to say so.
So this is not simply a history lesson.
If something on this page made you wish you had been there, you still can be. Take a week.
→ Find a camp and go — cfonorthamerica.org
Still to come in this series: Rules and Definitions for Prayer Groups · Why Pre-Prayer in CFO Matters · Fanner Bees · The Joy at the Beginning: A Word Study of Proverbs 8 · Why We Must Emphasize Intercessory Prayer in CFO. Each will be linked here as it publishes.
