Camps Farthest Out Messages on the subject of Jesus
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Alex McCullough retells his seven-year search for God. It ended, he says, on the Tappan Zee Bridge, when he saw “the Father and the Son” beside him in the car. At the Arkansas CFO in 1999 he ties the story to the week’s opening theme of being saved in order to serve.
Bunny Brock tells of nearly dying at eighteen from a bleeding tumor. “I am a miracle,” she says. Al Brock then teaches on the barriers that block campers from wholeness: unconfessed sin, unforgiveness, and bondage. The healing and blessing service comes from the Florida Family CFO in 1985.
In the fourth talk of her series on the spiritual way, Ruth Robison takes campers through Jesus as son of man, teacher, healer and revealer of the Father. She describes the shepherd who checks each sheep for thorn scratches at the narrow gate. She also describes the three-hour Easter Monday service her prayer group began, so that Christians would dwell in the resurrection rather than the cross. The series ran at the Nebraska CFO in 1960.
Morton Kelsey surveys theories of human aggression at the 1972 Iowa CFO. He runs from B.F. Skinner’s utopian Walden Two, needled with “Skinner never ran a church altar guild,” to Freud’s death wish. He then offers his own answer: the Lord’s Prayer petition to be delivered “from the evil one.”
Gertrude Dekock Keehn unpacks Jesus’ words “I am the way, the truth, and the life” for the camps. They were spoken from an overcoming spirit, she argues, not from ego. A man in a coffee shop once sat so absorbed in his book that his breakfast went stone cold, a moment she says taught her to judge rightly rather than by appearances. Finding that same inner way, rather than chasing psychic proofs or past life claims, is what lets anyone say those words for themselves.
At the 1958 Ottawa, Canada CFO, Gertrude Dekock Keehn traces Jesus’ full technique of prayer as he taught it on the mount, moving from his warning against hypocrites who pray to be seen to the call to “enter into thy closet” and pray in secret. She illustrates it with the paper controller who granted her all the paper for her book once he learned it had convinced him “there is no death.”
A pearl keeps no luster unless it is worn. Ruth Robison turns that line on the “pearls of great price” campers have been forming all week. Closing a week in the camps, she kneels in imagination to crown Jesus as king with her own life, and he crowns her in return with his trust and a new task.
A father records his own voice narrating a children’s story so he will not have to repeat it nightly. His daughter climbs into his lap anyway and says “it couldn’t put its arms around me.” At the Annual CFO in 1967, Cliff Richmond makes that the reason God had to take on flesh.
Willard Ireland discusses the three calls of Jesus before the commission during this talk from the 1966 Colorado Camps Farthest Out.
Alex McCullough closes his farewell talk with what he calls his “fantasy musicale,” a story he first told at the 1991 Nebraska CFO. In it a musician finally “heard” the old song “Come to Me, My Melancholy Baby” as an invitation, and gave his life, and later his family’s, to Jesus. He also reads John 21’s beach breakfast, urging campers to keep “seeing” Jesus after they go home.