Messages spoken at various Camps Farthest Out by June Crawford.
June Crawford was an executive secretary and Sunday school teacher from Peoria, Illinois. She came to Camps Farthest Out with her husband, Jack, served on the Advisory Council Ring, and began speaking at the camps in 1986 alongside Tommy Tyson. She taught prayer from the ground up, and she told plainly what the first seventeen years of her marriage had cost her.
In the 1990s, she and Jack took a Christian program into the prisons of Illinois. Through all of it, June kept coming back to the same thing: there is a difference between believing in God and believing God.
June grew up in Peoria during the Depression in a Christian home. “I was teaching Sunday school by the time I was 12 years old.” Her father had only a grade-school education, but when he died he was chief of plant protection for Caterpillar Tractor.
June could sing, too. “I sang with the St. Louis Municipal Opera the year I was 18 years old.” She went to work as a secretary and stayed in business for thirty-seven years, eventually becoming executive secretary to the president of a large corporation. “I had one increase and one promotion after another in business.”
June married Jack Crawford in 1946, when she was twenty. Jack was an Army veteran from Detroit. They had two daughters, eighteen months apart, and June continued working. A week after the wedding she discovered that Jack drank. Years later, when she first spoke at a CFO camp, she began by saying it plainly. “My name is June, and I am the wife of an alcoholic. I cannot tell you how much it cost me to be able to say that.”
The drinking went on for seventeen years. Somewhere along the way, June stopped believing. “Gradually, I became convinced that there was no God.” Jack got sober around 1962 and stayed sober. Looking back, June saw those lost years differently. “The 17 years that the locusts had eaten, Jesus has restored.” And she turned the usual question around. “The question should have been why do all these good things happen to us bad people?”
For about ten years after Jack stopped drinking, June believed in some kind of higher power but stayed away from church. Then she and Jack joined First Baptist Church of Peoria. A new pastor, James Middleton, arrived. He and June had been born on the same day of the same year.
One night he invited the Crawfords into the church parlor for a small prayer meeting and read Psalm 139:23–24. Then he told them about a picture of Jesus he had once stared at, with a single tear on Jesus’ face. He had asked himself whether he had caused it. June and Jack drove home in silence. In their living room they knelt on the floor. By morning, each had a list of things that needed to change.
The next day they gave up cigarettes. They had smoked for more than twenty years. “We’ve never had another cigarette. We’ve never wanted one.” For about four years they also worked with unwed mothers through a home in Peoria, helping some fifty young women. June would sit in the fathers’ waiting room at the hospital when their babies were being born.
A friend named Mary Hinch came home from an Illinois CFO camp and told the Crawfords they ought to come the following year. Jack did not want to spend a week’s vacation thirty-five miles from home at Illinois Wesleyan. He went anyway. He discovered that every man on his floor shared the same bathroom. “I thought I had left that in the Army.” The first man he met was shaving in a ratty old bathrobe. It was the Rev. Jim Brown, one of the week’s speakers.
On the second night, June slipped out to the women’s bathroom one floor away. She was in her nightgown and had forgotten her key. When she came back, the door was locked. She sat on the hall floor and knocked softly for nearly two hours. Then she heard Jack cough. He had been in the room all along. She let him in. A few minutes later, he went down the hall himself, and June slammed the door behind him. Before long there was another timid knock. She let him in again. They kept going back to CFO—two or three camps a year.
At that first camp, Jim Brown told about an old woman in his parish who was afraid she would die in pain. He had prayed with her that she would die healthy, and a month later she did. Jim Brown’s story of “A Delightful Inheritance”. June took the story home to her mother, who thought it was the silliest prayer she had ever heard. They prayed it anyway, in April. “And in May, my mother went to sleep, healthy as could be, and didn’t wake up the next morning.”
By 1982, June was leading a prayer group at the annual CFO meeting. In the mid-1980s she served on the Advisory Council Ring, its program committee, and as a zone chairman. As zone chairman and later as the ACR representative, she was responsible for leading the zone retreat. The committee chose the 1986 theme: Jesus as Lord, love as power, and prayer as breath. Bernie Warfield was the keynote speaker.
In 1986, at the zone retreat in Syracuse, Indiana, Jack collapsed. June found him on the floor, gray and not breathing. The ambulance crew asked which hospital she wanted. She did not know any of them, so she prayed and said Goshen. It turned out Goshen had the trauma center. The doctor found a ruptured aortic aneurysm and said Jack had to be operated on immediately. He told June that it made no difference whether he knew what he was doing or not. Jack was going to die. Her daughter asked for the odds. Ninety-five percent.
People from CFO began coming to the waiting room to pray, including Marcia Brown. A nurse eventually came out and told June something she had not expected: all five of Jack’s doctors were Christians, and they were praying aloud in the operating room. June settled the matter there. “I put my Isaac upon the altar.” She had made up her mind what she would do either way. “If he lives, I’ll praise you as long as I’m here. If he dies, I’ll praise you as long as I’m here.” Jack survived.
After the operation, his head was swollen to twice its normal size. He had received twenty-seven units of blood. The doctor told June it would take three days for the swelling to go down. June told him it would not. The prayer tower was calling people all over the country. Five hours later, all of Jack’s swelling was gone. “He left that hospital in 15 days and we flew back to Peoria.” June had settled something in that waiting room that she would carry into her speaking ministry. June’s account of “Isaac Upon the Altar”.
That same summer, June spoke at a CFO camp for the first time. It was her home camp in Illinois, and the other speaker was Tommy Tyson. “This is my first time to speak at CFO.” She went on to speak at Maine Acadia, Pembroke in Ontario, the annual meeting, Iowa, and Illinois again over the next several years.
June wrote her talks out and read them. Alex McCullough said he never noticed. “June writes her talks. When she reads them, I’m not conscious that she’s reading them.” The day after one camp, June lost the job she had held for seventeen years. By 1988 she was retired and teaching a large adult Sunday school class at First Baptist.
June had once known how to pray. Then she had spent years believing there was no God. She had to learn again from the ground up. Her story of “Learning to Pray Again”.
She taught people to pray how, not why. Pray specifically. Keep your eyes on God rather than on the trouble. Start with small things. Pray about lost car keys. Learn to trust God with ordinary matters before trying to trust Him with the enormous ones. “He doesn’t always say yes. He sometimes says no. He sometimes says later. And we have to go into God’s waiting room.” She had another way of saying it: “You don’t pray out. You pray up.” And then she drew the distinction that had become central to her own life: “There is a big difference in believing in God and believing God.”
Glenn Clark’s I Will Lift Up Mine Eyes had changed her life, and she encouraged campers to read A Man’s Reach. She taught about the holiness of God from Isaiah 6 and from R. C. Sproul. Her illustrations were simple and memorable. “If you look at a red rose, through a piece of red glass, it’s white as snow.”
She also had an answer ready for newcomers who misheard the name of the organization. “Camps for the Stout? No, it is not Camps for the Stout. It is Camps Farthest Out.” And she sent them home with a prayer of her own: “I hope you’re going home with empty suitcases.”
In September 1990, June and Jack went into prison on a team for the first time. They served with Faith, Hope, and Love in Christ, a Peoria organization. “We take the Walk to Emmaus program into the women’s prison, and the rec program, or Residents Encounter Christ, into the men’s.” They went into Lincoln, Sheridan, and Dwight. They spent one day a week at a halfway house in Peoria and served on Teens Encounter Christ teams.
June had spent much of her life learning that God does not waste the hard years. She had seen a marriage restored, a faith rebuilt, a husband brought back from the edge of death, and people reached in places most Christians never entered. She came back from the prisons with one conviction: “There are no throw away people.”
*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.