Messages given at various Camps Farthest Out by Norman Renshaw
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Norman Renshaw points to a dead tree that three men wanted to clear away that morning, and finds in it an unexpected picture of resurrection. He describes four years spent repeating “God loves me” and, harder still, “God loves him,” until his resentment toward a deacon who had confronted him finally broke. Speaking to the camps, he sets Eros, the Greek god of love at Piccadilly Circus, against the self-giving love of the cross on St Paul’s Cathedral. He asks which one campers actually serve.
At the 1980 Michigan CFO, Norman Renshaw delivers the golden jubilee keynote, fifty years after Glenn Clark launched the movement in 1930. He recounts how testing a dream before praying it into being helped found an orphanage in Sri Lanka. On a morning run he pictures Jesus saying, “I’ll race you up the Mount of Transfiguration.” He calls the campers farther out in body, mind, heart, and soul.
Norman Renshaw walks through the opening chapter of John, where Jesus meets Andrew, Simon, Philip, and Nathaniel and tells them simply, “Come and see.” In the same talk to the 1978 New Hampshire Winni CFO, he pictures the Trinity as one God shown through three roles, the way one actor could change masks to play different parts.
Norman Renshaw compares an ineffective prayer to a check that must be “countersigned” by Jesus before it can reach heaven. He cites a study in which believers who prayed alone nightly for nine months saw no improvement at all. From Mark 11, he urges the campers at the 1978 New Hampshire Winni CFO to “have faith in God” and to ask boldly in Christ’s name.
Norman Renshaw tells the camps about a bedridden widow who begged night after night to die, yet would not act on it. He then describes a night visit to the garden of Gethsemane. There he sensed Christ say, “I’ve suffered all the pain and all the suffering, and it’s over.” He came away filled with an unexpected sense of resurrection joy.
Norman Renshaw tells campers that hearing Roland Brown say “there was no duty in the kingdom” once dismantled half his sense of ministry. He pictures Joseph the carpenter mending a broken lectern by seeing it whole in his mind before he touches it. He confesses that he eventually asked Christ to take the pulpit itself, not just his healing services. The talk was given to the New York Finger Lakes CFO in 1978.
Norman Renshaw recounts a college dream in which he refused to be silenced by his old principal and then playfully removed the man’s head. He uses the dream to press campers toward taking responsibility for their own choices, rather than blaming parents, church, or peers. The talk was recorded at the 1983 Arizona CFO.
Norman Renshaw opens the week with a story about a reluctant Presbyterian minister who was talked into attending a camp and squeezed into an overfull Beetle for the ride. He uses it to describe how the camp’s rhythm of meditation, rest, and creative time works if campers give themselves fully to it, in this first talk at the Arizona CFO in 1983.
At the 1983 Arizona CFO, Norman Renshaw explains that the subconscious mind cannot choose what it is fed; it can only replay it. Agnes Sanford’s memory of learning as a toddler that illness won her attention is his first case. He also tells of a married man freed in prayer from a lifelong obsession with women’s hair, after Jesus led him back to reframe a childhood memory of his mother.
Norman Renshaw teaches on wholeness of spirit, soul, and body. His own stomach, he says, argued with him until he gave in, skipped a noisy meal, and rested. In the same talk to the Arizona CFO in 1983, he tells of praying for Poland’s protection and finding that God would not let the prayer go through until he loved Poland’s enemies as much as he loved the Poles.