Messages given at the Ohio Camps Farthest Out
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Bernie Warfield preaches on the “power to become” sons of God from Romans 8, framing suffering as the fire that purifies a Christian. He recalls being turned away from a Missouri diner because of his race while the Sunday church bells tolled outside. He was speaking at the Ohio CFO in 1960.
Bernie Warfield tells campers at the Ohio CFO in 1960 that they are “sitting on a gold mine,” the divinity buried deep within. Spiritual growth cannot be forced, he says, like a hatching chick that must break its own shell or die. He calls suffering God’s chisel, shaping a person into the likeness of Christ.
One current runs the refrigerator and the television. God’s impersonal power is just as impartial in the moral world, Starr Daily says, and it served the man who robbed a bank to buy a rescue mission, then converted him through his own preaching. At the 1964 Ohio CFO, the talk sends campers into a communion service with one instruction: seek the kingdom first, and the neutral power will be used well.
Starr Daily describes a prophetic sense that all creation is made of doors. Every one of them is turned toward the single door that is Jesus, through whom a person goes in and out and finds pasture. He tells the 1964 Ohio CFO about a young woman on a Los Angeles street corner who was set free the moment she could force out the name of Jesus.
Closing the Ohio CFO in 1961, Starr Daily draws five laws of prayer out of the prodigal son. They run from the boy’s first selfish “Give me” to the humbled “Make me as one of thy hired servants.” He reads the robe, the ring, the shoes, and the fatted calf as the father’s four gifts. The son rehearsed his repentance speech the whole way home, he notes, only to have his father’s arms cut it off.
Starr Daily presents kindness as the homely form of redemptive love that opens every closed door, moving from the athlete Rafer Johnson to George Washington Carver dying as the Hallelujah Chorus played, and back to his own conversion in prison.
At the 1953 Ohio CFO, Catherine Marshall preaches that every ordinary believer, not only the famous, is meant to be light in a dark world. She tells of a friend who felt strangely empty after a deliverance prayer, until the Holy Spirit was invited in to fill the space.
Catherine Marshall tells how she wrote “A Man Called Peter” as an act of guidance more than effort. She recalls a stranger who volunteered to critique her manuscript, and a Hollywood producer who replaced a scriptwriter right after she prayed about it alone. She was speaking to the Ohio CFO in 1953.
At the Ohio CFO in 1970, Anna Mow describes a dying woman whose husband told her, years too late, that their troubled marriage had been his fault all along. The woman’s last message was relayed by a nurse, and it was simply that “the poor in spirit way works.” That quiet, costly forgiveness is what Anna Mow brings to the campers.
A young minister could not feel the Holy Spirit amid two small boys in a cramped apartment. Anna Mow told him to buy his wife three dozen roses rather than wait for God to change his mood. Within weeks, she tells the Ohio CFO in 1970, the home and the church had both changed.