Messages spoken at various Camps Farthest Out by Bob Hillock.
Bob Hillock was a pastor and Christian counselor from Sundre, Alberta, who came to Christ as a boy at an InterVarsity camp in Ontario. He first came to the Camps Farthest Out in Alberta in 1976, spoke at the Montana CFO in 1985 and the annual CFO gathering in 1991, and taught at the Washington CFO retreat in 1997. His messages were practical and often drawn from ordinary life—from highway signs and counseling rooms to a flock of sheep that escaped through a hole in the fence.
Bob was thirteen when a counselor at an InterVarsity Christian Fellowship camp took him down by the water and talked with him about Christ. “And it was that night that I accepted Christ. And I’ve been walking with him ever since.”
The walking was not always straight. Bob said he “hit the ditch” a few times during his teenage years, but “God rescued me time after time.” At eighteen he knelt at the front of a little pink church in St. Thomas, Ontario, and rededicated his life to the Lord. For a while he tried to make the Christian life fit a set of rules. He joined a strict church because he wanted to belong, but eventually realized what was happening. “I found that the church rules were working faster on me than the Holy Spirit.”
Bob and his wife came to their first CFO in Alberta in 1976 with some reservations. A charismatic woman had encouraged them to go, and the Hillocks were Nazarenes. “And we thought, that must mean that CFO is charismatic, and we were Nazarenes.” Their plan was to sit toward the back and watch.
Years later Bob could laugh at himself. “I came to CFO and I thought Christians, all Christians were Nazarenes.” What he discovered at the camps was a much larger Christian family. One of his favorite pictures of CFO was “a Lutheran and a Catholic with their arms around one another praising the Lord.”
He also came to value the way different speakers and traditions were brought together. “I am constantly amazed the way God puts speakers together at CFO.” At one Alberta camp, facing important decisions, Bob went walking alone on a misty night. The moon shone through the trees and across the road while he talked with God and yielded what he was carrying. It was the kind of quiet encounter he would later encourage others to seek for themselves.
At the Montana CFO in 1985, Bob told the campers that sharing Christ did not require special credentials. “You know, a lot of people think you have to have a degree to be a soul winner.” He pointed to Pentecost, where people heard the good news in their own languages, and said God still knew how to reach people in ways they could understand.
“God is still doing miracles the same way today as he was doing two thousand years ago.” He told of a town of about five thousand people where local Christian men invited a thousand people to supper at an arena. More than eight hundred came. Among them were students brought by a high school principal, and about thirty of those students came forward to receive Christ. For Bob, that was the miracle worth looking for. “The greatest wonder in the world is a changed life.”
By the time Bob spoke at the annual CFO gathering in 1991, he and his wife had raised a large family of eight children. Six were grown, with the youngest two just entering junior high. Driving through the mountains toward a zone CFO in Mission, British Columbia, Bob began noticing ordinary road signs as parables: speed limits, stop signs, and yield signs. The road itself became a way of talking about listening to God and knowing when to move, slow down, stop, or yield. Bob also spoke about a difficult season in his work and family life when he realized “there was an authority that I was not using.” He remembered the Scripture that says to resist the devil and he will flee. Bob did. “Things changed.”
By the Washington CFO retreat in 1997, Bob’s ministry had changed. “I’ve been a pastor and now I’m a counselor and there’s some neat differences.” Across the counseling table he met people carrying wounds that a sermon alone could not always uncover. Some had gone through life without ever receiving a father’s blessing.
Bob had something he wanted them to know: “There’s no rejects in the kingdom of God. None.” That conviction fit naturally with what Merle Alexander was teaching at the same retreat about what belongs to the children of God.
Bob had also spent three years raising sheep, which gave him material Jesus himself would have appreciated. One day about 150 of Bob’s sheep discovered a hole in the fence and poured through it into a neighboring farmer’s barley field. Bob saw something of ourselves in them. Without Christ, he described us in three words: “Dead, trapped, and lost.” In Christ, the words changed: “We’re alive and free and found.”
That led naturally to another of his favorite pictures. Jesus said that his sheep hear his voice. Bob believed learning that voice required something simple that could not be replaced by programs, rules, or religious activity. “We need to learn that if we’re to learn and know the Master’s voice, we’ve got to spend time with him.” Perhaps that was something Bob had been learning ever since he was thirteen years old and a counselor took him down beside the water.
Bob had music in him too. In high school he played in a rock band. By 1997 the Christian counselor and former pastor from Sundre was playing string bass in a traditional bluegrass band. “We just love to sing and play bluegrass gospel music.”
It is an appropriate final picture of Bob Hillock: a man who began by thinking Christians ought to look like the people in his own church and ended up rejoicing over Lutherans and Catholics praising God together, counseling people who thought they were rejects, talking about wandering sheep—and playing gospel music on a string bass. “The greatest wonder in the world is a changed life.”
*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.