Messages given at various Camps Farthest Out by Glenn Harding
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Glenn Harding urges campers to see past the surface and really see one another. He illustrates it with Alec Smith, a once self-absorbed teenager who found direction at a camp and carried it through a chance meeting in England to Liberia. Within a month of settling in the village of Barnway, the team’s first church meeting drew 185 people. The talk comes from the New Hampshire Winni CFO in 1963.
At the New Hampshire Winni CFO in 1963, Glenn Harding reads from letters sent home by Koinonia’s mission team in Liberia. One tells of a hostile village leader known only as “Honorable.” He tested a young team member for months, until the day they finally “ate out of the same pan.”
The writer Herman Hagedorn was stuck for months on an unfinished poem about the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Glenn Harding tells how he finished it only after a night of prayer, during a visit to his daughters at a Moral Rearmament gathering. Harding uses the story to describe the narrow way that leads to real spiritual power in the movement.
Glenn Harding describes a door that slams itself shut, moved not by force but by a gentle, sustained breeze. He uses it to explain why following the Holy Spirit works better than pushing toward a goal in one’s own strength. He offered the picture to the 1952 Minnesota Koronis CFO.
Glenn Harding tells of Rosamund Kimball, an early camper whose car breaks down on a lonely road. She insists that “the all-encompassing good will take care of it.” In the same talk to the 1949 Indiana CFO, he describes prayer experiments on seeds and bacteria, and a widening missionary vision called “Koinonia.”
At the 1952 Minnesota Koronis CFO, Glenn Harding teaches on making room for the Holy Spirit. He applies “not by might, nor by power, but by my spirit” to a car-crash victim who calmly told the other driver, “This should prove interesting,” echoing his father’s old advice.
At the Wisconsin CFO in 1959, Glenn Harding opens with a warning from Thomas a Kempis that Jesus “hath many lovers of his heavenly kingdom, but few bearers of his cross.” He applies it to casting out the ordinary fears that block love, illustrating with a hospital experiment in which a friendly dog is ignored until it stops eating. He also uses the saying “he isn’t heavy, he’s my brother” about carrying a tired child to safety.
Glenn Harding tells how the disciples fished all night and caught nothing until the risen Jesus told them to cast their net on the other side. He links the story to his own recent surrender to God after a serious hospital stay. Every church in his town, he recalls, “prayed for little old Glenn Harding” during his recovery. He was speaking to the Wisconsin CFO in 1959.
Christian love must reach beyond those who already love us back, Glenn Harding preaches at the New Hampshire Winni CFO in 1963. He recalls how his own mother once wept and asked his forgiveness after wrongly punishing him as a boy. He also tells how Rufus Mosley walked into a gathering lynch mob and defused it by saying, “if you’re alright you won’t mind the light.”
Glenn Harding works through campers’ questions on fear, resentment, and prayer at the 1963 New Hampshire Winni CFO. He retells how a young man with cerebral palsy once confessed “all of my life I have hated my body,” and then learned self-acceptance. He calls prayer “the soul’s sincere desire.”