Camps Farthest Out Messages on the subject of discipline
Home » The Library » Subject » Discipline
Barbara Ann Chase teaches Dick Eastman’s five-minute prayer clock for daily devotions. She leads campers in thanking God out loud for ordinary conveniences, from a flight attendant’s suitcase wheels to telephone lines. Spoken gratitude, she says, is the discipline behind hearing God clearly. The teaching comes from the Florida Family CFO in 1984.
Alex McCullough closes the servant themed week at the Arkansas CFO in 1999 by telling campers that they cannot take the camp home with them, only what it made of them. Following God, he says, is a matter of obedience, not convenience. He then plays a wordless “Testimony Musical” on saxophone and clarinet, the same instruments he set aside, unplayed, for ten years after becoming a Christian.
Three young people came off the street to a week in the camps, and Ruth Robison tells what happened. Vera’s arm was swollen, and Robison prayed over it after midnight; Vera later took communion for the first time. Russell handed her the loaded pistol he had bought to end his life. She turns from there to the small disciplines of the Holy Spirit, among them “invest in your expectancy.”
Johnny Johnson recalls being turned away from a childhood friend’s front door for being black, and how the boy’s mother invited him back in and reconciled them. He also describes his own baptism in the Holy Spirit years later. The talk was given at the Florida Family CFO in 1985.
Ruth Robison closes a week of teaching with a charge on discipline. Being made well and staying well are two different things, she says, and “a disciple is a disciplined person.” Then she turns prayer around, reading out a list of the prayers God is praying and asking groups across the camps to begin by choosing which one they will help answer. The week was at the West Virginia Capon Springs CFO.
Nobody fails without an alibi, Starr Daily argues, and scripture itself can be raided for dignified ones. He tells campers about a young pastor who was terrified of a larger church. Daily made him type a letter to his bishop with his hands sweating. He adds that years of praying for patience brought him not more patience but more chances to practice it.
Roland Brown preaches from the call to present your bodies a living sacrifice. He names a man on two crutches the healthiest person to be found in the camps. The cross, he insists, is not the affliction itself but the radiant spirit in which it is carried.
Continuing her Lamentations series, Iverna Tompkins retells Christ’s Gethsemane prayer and tells the story of a troubled woman her congregation once helped restore. She insists that “judgment has begun in the house of the Lord” before it ever reaches the world. The teaching comes from the Missouri CFO in 1979.
At the Missouri CFO in 1979, Iverna Tompkins moves from Lamentations 1 into chapter 2. She warns campers that shifting doctrine and what she calls the “silence of the elders” reveal a loss of wisdom in the church. She contrasts Miriam’s simple tambourine song with Moses’ theological one, which few understood.
On the second morning of the 1966 California Asilomar Healing CFO, Genevieve Parkhurst opens with John 15’s vine and branches. She recalls a childhood memory of watching a gardener graft and wax-seal a fruit tree bud as a picture of the new birth. A loosened wax seal, she warns, lets water and decay back into the graft the way sin lets decay back into a life. She closes with the line “God has no grandchildren”: no one enters God’s family except by a will of their own.