Messages spoken at various Camps Farthest Out by Bob Carey.
The Rev. Bob Carey is an Episcopal priest from California and Oregon who came to Christ out of the hippie communes of the 1960s. He searched through Catholicism, Billy Graham, philosophy, LSD, the counterculture, and the religions of the East before finding Jesus through a crew of Christian loggers in Oregon. He went on to run a youth and drug program that became a national model, enter the Episcopal priesthood, and become a speaker at the Camps Farthest Out.
Bob was baptized a Roman Catholic as a child, and at sixteen he went forward at a Billy Graham crusade. It did not last. “I was baptized when I was a child, but I didn’t receive the Holy Spirit until I was 28.”
He joined the Coast Guard but could not handle the discipline and confrontation. After three months in the Naval Hospital at Key West, Florida, he was discharged from the service. At the University of Louisville he studied art and philosophy and won a prize for a paper arguing against God. He also took LSD for the first time. “But I had an experience on LSD that changed my lifestyle and my journey. And I experienced the fact that I was not the center of the universe, and that there was a God, and I really wanted to know who that God was.”
In the 1960s he went to Santa Cruz, fell in with Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, and met Joy, who became his wife. They started a commune. “We were all into the acid scene. Started a commune. Taking lots of LSD. Smoking lots of marijuana.” He tried the religions of the East as well. “But you know, I like to say that the Buddha led me to Jesus.”
The commune eventually moved to 240 acres near Grants Pass, Oregon. During their first winter they were snowed in without enough firewood. Then men from a Christian commune about thirty miles away arrived and cut some thirty cords of wood for them. They asked for nothing in return. Bob went to their kitchen, knelt down, and was filled with the Holy Spirit. “My guru, the man that led me to know Jesus Christ, was a crew-cutted man who had not graduated from the sixth grade.”
He and Joy moved to the Christian commune and later married quietly. With Joy expecting a baby, forty dollars in their pockets, and a borrowed bread truck, they drove to Boise, Idaho, where Bob gave his testimony for the first time.
They eventually settled in Hoquiam, Washington, where their son Christopher was born at home. Bob started a youth and drug program there that became a national model and took the program to the state government in Olympia. Later he became a drug counselor for the San Lorenzo Valley schools near Santa Cruz and finished his degree at the University of California there. Then the local newspaper discovered his past. “I’d been arrested. I had an FBI record and everything else.” He stayed about two years.
An Episcopal church stood a few blocks from the house he and Joy rented, and there he was called to the ministry. He was not drawn to the priesthood because he considered himself especially holy. “I chose to be a priest not because I’m a holy person.”
At seminary he served as chaplain to the elderly at St. Paul’s Towers in Oakland and baptized a ninety-six-year-old woman. He was ordained at St. Paul’s Church in Oakland, with Cliff Custer among those present. His mother and Joy laid hands on him. He served as an assistant at St. Paul’s, then as rector of a parish in Gonzales, California, and later in Bend, Oregon.
About 1972 he came to his first CFO at La Honda and gave his first talk there to the youth. Later at La Honda, Ruth Carter Stapleton led him through the healing of old memories. In 1978 he spoke at the Northern California camp with John and Paula Sandford. He reminded the camp what mountaintop experiences are for. “Spiritual experiences will get us through changing diapers.”
He later spoke at Ocean Pines with Margaret Watson, who remembered one of his stories in particular—the tale of Hashmu, the stonecutter who wanted to be everything except himself. “A voice from heaven said, Hashmu, be yourself.” That story became one of Bob’s favorite ways of talking about Christian growth. He had spent much of his own life searching for something outside himself, only to discover that God was calling him into the person he had been created to become. “The conversion of Bob Carey is still only beginning.”
He did not believe people had to become perfect before God could use them. “We don’t have to be perfect for God to be able to use us.” And he had learned what had actually changed him. “It’s never been my will that’s changed me. It’s always been love that has changed me.”
He taught through stories, whether from Scripture, fairy tales, or the stonecutter who wanted to become somebody else. The lesson was always personal: become teachable, receive God’s love, and become yourself in Christ. “So what is the task of the body of Christ? To kiss frogs, brothers and sisters.”
And when he talked about humility, he made sure it did not sound like weakness. “Humility to me doesn’t mean being stepped on and being a floor mat. Being humble means to be teachable.”
*Note:
Many speakers lived before the days of the internet and many had very limited biographical information available. The information in these biographies came mostly from transcripts of their messages, and relies heavily on their own spoken words. Please contact us if you have any corrections.