Camps Farthest Out Messages on the subject of CFO History
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Ruth Robison tells campers she used to plead with them to be jet planes. Now, she says, “you’ve got to be a spaceship.” Her dedication charge to the Annual CFO in 1961 recalls the lanterns carried up the hill at Star Island until the chapel wall was full of light. She asks every council ring to leave its fear of divine power behind.
Ruth Robison once sat on a lawn reading a book rather than listen to Glenn Clark, until he asked whether that was fair. A single morning talk on prayer then remade her praying and drew her into the movement. Telling that on an opening night, she urges new campers into every part of the week, warning that “a watcher in the kingdom will never experience divine power.”
John Hobbs opens his session at the Florida Family CFO in 2002 by introducing his family, including his son and pastor, who will share the week’s speaking. He then teaches from Ezekiel 47, where a trickle of water from the temple grows into a river too deep to cross. He offers it as a picture of the Holy Spirit poured out on believers.
Louise Eggleston revisits, for the New Hampshire Winni CFO in 1959, the founding of a training center a decade earlier. A roofer refused to touch a leaking tile roof rather than disturb a beehive, and a worker who cleared it found fifty years of stored honey.
In an opening-night orientation to the California Asilomar Healing CFO in 1966, Genevieve Parkhurst explains how Dr. Glenn Clark founded Camps Farthest Out. She argues that the same “great wisdom” that guides migrating swallows is at work as “the life within” the body, which does all real healing, doctors included. She notes that “one verse in every seven in the Gospels pertains to a physical healing.”
At the 1952 Minnesota Koronis CFO, Glenn Clark lays out a growth plan for the movement. He wants a trained organizer he calls a queen bee in every city, leading callers on shut-ins. He wants a paid national coordinator. And he wants local groups renamed as an interdenominational prayer fellowship rather than a closed circle.
Tony Brayton reads Glenn Clark’s Bond of Faith to the 1960 New Hampshire Winni CFO in memory of him and argues that hearing something true counts for nothing until it is acted on. He counts the four separate steps between hearing an alarm clock and actually being up.
Bert Kerley describes what he calls the perfect timing that carried him into Camps Farthest Out: a canceled lunch date, a walk past the Quaker Friends House, and a book waiting on a shelf. He closes with the memory of flying blind through a cloud into open blue sky. He gave the talk at the 1983 New Hampshire Winni CFO.
At the Zone 4 CFO retreat in 2005, Roland Brown Jr. traces how Glenn Clark’s Bible class in Minneapolis grew into the first Camp Farthest Out, funded by twelve businessmen in 1930. He also recalls Glenn Clark, as a boy, dousing a blazing cottage fire with one bucket of water.
Glenn Harding tells how Starr Daily rode the freights into the hobo jungles at the depth of the Depression, wanting to see what was happening to the country’s young people. One woman’s three hundred dollars then sent him to Washington with the manuscript no magazine would print. Harding was speaking at the Annual CFO in 1980.