Messages spoken at various Camps Farthest Out by Carl Gustafson.
Carl Gustafson was a young Southern Baptist pastor of a small church in Trenton, New Jersey, when he began teaching at Camps Farthest Out. He spoke at the Pennsylvania Keystone camp in 1979 with Tommy Tyson and returned in 1980 with Dan Yutzy.
He taught people to seek God’s face rather than His hand, to receive the Father’s discipline, and to keep going when prayer seemed unanswered. He was twenty-seven when he first stood on the CFO platform.
Carl met Jesus when he was about twelve or thirteen. It took a while to become serious about it. “It wasn’t until April of my senior year in high school that I even begun to got serious to the Lord.”
His pastor back home had a particular way of preaching. “So my pastor back home, every sermon, you know, with four T’s, four P’s, six S’s.” Carl spent about five years struggling as a young Christian. He had come to Christ, but he had not yet learned what it meant to build his life around Him. That would come later.
Carl was a student in New Jersey, while Brenda was in Texas. They carried on what Carl jokingly called “a male correspondence engagement period.” His prized possession was a reel-to-reel recording of Brenda singing. “Brenda has an angelic voice. I brag on her. She’s my wife, but it’s true.”
They married in June 1973. Within months, Carl was pastor of a small Southern Baptist church in Trenton. There were about sixty faithful members. He was not looking for a bigger church. “If that means staying in a little closet in Trenton, that’s pleasing God, praise Him.” The size of the church did not determine whether the work mattered.
Around 1975, someone taught Carl something that changed the way he lived: he needed to spend time alone with God every day. “About four years ago, God began to teach me through another individual that the only way I would ever survive as a minister or as a Christian is to spend time daily alone with God.”
A year or so later, he attended a conference in Toccoa, Georgia. A Chinese preacher preached a message that left Carl with nowhere to hide. “Now Carl, from here on out, there’s no excuse. You have heard the message.”
Carl and Brenda also began working their way out of debt. He discovered that discipline was not about enjoying something. “So a discipline is something you do regularly, not because you enjoy it, but because it’s necessary and important for it to be done.” That lesson would follow him into his ministry.
Carl and Brenda first came to CFO around 1977. In June 1979, Carl was one of the teachers at the Keystone camp at Messiah College in Pennsylvania. He was twenty-seven years old and shared the platform with Tommy Tyson. He built his week around the greatest commandment: loving God with heart, soul, and mind. “This is Brenda and I’s third CFO.”
Tommy enjoyed having the young preacher around. “Old Carl standing down here. Yeah, he’s a profound teacher, good teacher. But I declare, he’s such a handsome man.” Tommy also picked up one of Carl’s central teachings. “Carl told us the other morning that the greatest revelation of God in the New Testament is one word, Father.”
Carl taught that temptation could reveal something useful. “The devil never tempts me or never entices me in areas where I’m strong.” So instead of simply resenting the temptation, he learned to take the weakness to God. “Father, thank you that you’ve just revealed a weakness in me.” The weakness was no longer something to hide. It was something God could work on.
Carl returned to Keystone in 1980, this time with Dan Yutzy. He told the story of that reel-to-reel recording of Brenda singing and asked what kind of fiancé would love the recording more than the woman herself. That led into one of his favorite lessons about prayer. “How many of you know that it’s in the face that the real person is revealed? Not in his hand.”
Carl wanted people to seek God Himself, not merely what God could give them. Dan Yutzy remembered the teaching. “When Carl talked about seeing the face of Jesus, I just could remember how that felt.” Dan also remembered another thing Carl had said. “I appreciated what you said the other day, Carl, when you suggested that God doesn’t need advertising.”
Back in Trenton, Carl and Brenda were trying to take the same faith beyond the church walls. They held block parties for the neighborhood, beginning in their own front yard. “God gave us 500 free hot dogs. And brace yourself, 3,000 pieces of ice cream free.” Carl wanted people to encounter Christ outside the church building. “Revival’s for the saints, not for the pagans.” The church had to carry what God was doing into the neighborhood.
Carl taught that Christians needed a theology of perseverance. “Now is the day that we need to begin developing theologies of perseverance.” He knew that people often measured God’s work by how quickly they saw results. “See, time is a problem for us. But God’s got a lot more of it than we do.”
He thought about Jesus spending thirty years in relative obscurity before beginning His public ministry. “God, obscurity is wonderful.” Carl’s point was not to make people comfortable with doing nothing. It was to teach them not to mistake waiting for failure.
He encouraged people to build one another up. “You know, you can never over-affirm somebody.” He also taught that worship was not a spectator sport. “Worship is entering into a personal love affair with God. And there really isn’t much room for spectators. Only participants in worship.” Carl was still Carl, though. He knew he talked fast. “See, I talk fast. You have to listen fast when I talk so fast.” The young pastor from the little church in Trenton had learned that God was not in a hurry—and neither an unanswered prayer nor a season of obscurity meant that God had stopped working.
*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.