Camps Farthest Out Messages on the subject of Kingdom Living
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Bertha Jarrett recalls being teased as one of the “big Berthas,” after the German cannons of the first war, because she outgrew her classmates as a girl. Years later her husband’s sudden death sent her into the Beatitudes and the teaching on the mount for the first time. She tells the camps that seeking the kingdom first, as Jesus taught, opened every door that followed.
Alex McCullough opens the week’s servant themed talks with Jesus washing the disciples’ feet in John 13, at the Arkansas CFO in 1999. He ties it back to Matthew 20’s charge that “whoever would be first among you must be your slave.” He admits that his own upbringing with a live-in butler made real service hard to receive. He would rather his wife “slam it to me,” he says, than ever catch him acting like a pastor.
Al Durrance preaches under the marquee title “Turkeys Unite” at the Florida Family CFO in 1986. He warns against the chicken yard instinct to peck an already wounded bird. He calls campers to answer the Holy Spirit’s three questions: whether they are willing to be led, changed, and used.
Al Durrance walks campers through a typical day at the camp, from morning meditation through rhythms, creatives, and prayer groups. He jokes that recreation is not a wreck but its own re-creation. The talk was given at the Florida Family CFO in 1999.
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.
At the Florida CFO in 1955, Mittie Waters preaches on the phrase “help cometh.” She moves from a prison boy who underlined the words in his Bible to the caged bird man of Alcatraz, who kept his faith raising canaries. She also tells how prison director Walter Anderson ended a six-hour riot in which ten officials were held hostage. Anderson offered to take a hostage’s place, and all ten were freed unharmed.
Glenn Harding urges campers to see past the surface and really see one another. He illustrates it with Alec Smith, a once self-absorbed teenager who found direction at a camp and carried it through a chance meeting in England to Liberia. Within a month of settling in the village of Barnway, the team’s first church meeting drew 185 people. The talk comes from the New Hampshire Winni CFO in 1963.
Frank Laubach traces how Jesus brought compassion for the poor into a world that had none. He follows that line from the founding of the SPCC to Herbert Hoover’s wartime relief effort. It ends with the phone call to a senator that helped launch the Point Four aid program, a cause he urges the camps to take up.
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.
At the Annual CFO in 1967, Bertha Jarrett opens to the third chapter of John to explain what it means that “now are we the sons of God,” already one with each other and with Christ. She tells campers about a man in India who stops a policeman from striking a beggar by saying, “my brother, you are hitting yourself.”