Look at the schedule before you look at the theology.
Monday is games and learning everybody’s name. Tuesday is more games and a swim test. By Wednesday she has not slept properly in three nights, she misses her own bed and has not said so out loud, and the singing at night has been getting longer and slower each evening. Thursday is the big night. Friday morning everybody packs up and goes home.
What Church Camp Does to Kids Is Mostly a Matter of Timing
The emotional weight of the week climbs on a curve, the curve peaks on Thursday, and the invitation is offered at the top of it.
A nine year old standing at the top of that curve is not in a strong position to evaluate anything. She is also not being asked to. She is being asked to feel something and then to act on the feeling while it is still moving.
Nobody in That Room Is Being Cynical
This is where I want to be careful, because it would be easy to write this post as an accusation and it would be wrong.
The counselor running that cabin is usually nineteen. She has not slept either. She believes what she is saying and she is watching a kid she has grown fond of over four days, and she wants something good for her. Most of the adults on that campus are sincere and a fair number of them are exhausted volunteers who took a week of vacation to be there.
Structure does not require anybody’s bad intent to work. A week built this way produces a certain result whether or not a single person in the building meant to engineer it, and the people running it have usually inherited the format rather than designed it. Most of them went through the same week themselves at eleven.
So the useful question is not who is to blame. It is what the format reliably produces, and whether you want your child inside it at eight, or eleven, or fifteen.
The Fear Usually Arrives Before the Invitation Does
The content matters as much as the timing, and it tends to run in a particular order.
Somewhere on Wednesday or Thursday the stakes get raised. Depending on the camp this can be gentle or it can be extremely direct, and in a fair number of places it involves what happens to people who do not decide. Week 36 takes up that material in full, because it is the single thing parents write to me about most.
Then the fear gets a resolution, and the resolution is available tonight, in this room, with the music still going and everyone’s eyes closed.
Camps differ enormously on this and it is worth knowing which kind you are sending her to. Some are essentially outdoor recreation with a chapel service attached. Some run the arc hard and count the results at the end of the week. The brochure will not tell you which one you have. Other parents will, and so will asking the director what Thursday night actually looks like.
I would ask any adult reading this to notice the order. The distress is generated first. The relief is offered second. Whatever else that is, it is not a neutral setting for a child to work out what she thinks about God.
What Happens in October
She comes home lit up. That part is real and I would not talk anyone out of it. Something happened, she has friends she did not have in June, and she sang for five nights with people who were glad she was there.
Then school starts. The feeling wears off sometime in October, and nobody warns a kid that it is going to.
That is the part I would watch. For some children the fading is the whole injury, because they were told the feeling was the evidence. When it goes, a reasonable nine year old concludes that she did it wrong, or that it did not take, or that something about her specifically is the problem. And so she waits for next summer to fix it, and the following July she does it again.
Plenty of kids sail through all of it. They have a great week, the feeling fades, they shrug, and nothing about it lodges anywhere. Whether it lodges seems to depend a good deal on how much weight the week put on the feeling to begin with, and on whether anyone at home treats the fading as a problem that needs solving.
Adults tell me they can name the night. Which cabin, which song, what the counselor said, occasionally what they were wearing. They cannot tell me one other thing about that summer.
What to Say Before She Goes, and What to Say When She Gets Back
The strongest move available to you is not a veto. It is telling her how the week is built before she gets on the bus.
Ages 3 to 6. This age is mostly vacation Bible school rather than sleepaway camp, and the week is shorter and lighter. Send her if she wants to go, and do the asking afterward rather than the coaching beforehand. What did you sing? What did they tell you about? Then listen to the answer without correcting it in the moment.
Ages 7 to 12. Say the mechanics out loud, plainly, before she leaves. There is going to be a night near the end where the music goes long and everything feels very big. That feeling is real and it is also partly the music and being tired and being away from home. You do not have to decide anything that night. You can come home and think about it for a month, and I will still be here.
Ages 13 and up. A teenager can be handed the whole structure, and handing it over is protective rather than cynical. Walk through the shape of the week with her. Then give her the sentence from Week 2 that applies here as well, which is that whatever she decides at camp, or does not decide, changes nothing about her standing with you.
When she comes back, ask about the friends and the food first. Get to the Thursday night material later, and get to it more than once, because the useful conversation is rarely the one that happens in the car on the way home.
You Can Still Send Her
Nothing here means camp is off the table.
The friendships are real. Five days outdoors with no screen is good for almost anybody. Singing with a large group at night is one of the few things left that does what it does, and I am not going to pretend that is worthless because the theology attached to it was thin.
The thing worth removing is the leverage, and most of the leverage lives in the belief that a decision has to be made tonight or something is lost. A child who knows she can go home and think about it for a month has been handed most of what she needs, and she can still have the best week of her summer.
Next week we go after a harder question, which is what to do with the Sunday school teacher who taught you the frightening version and meant every word of it kindly.
About Pastor Brad Jagger
Pastor Brad Jagger is Senior Pastor of Windermere Union Church (UCC) in Windermere, Florida, a community committed to Love Above All. He writes about faith, doubt, deconstruction, belonging, and raising children who never have to be afraid of God.
If you are raising kids after leaving the faith you grew up in, and you want a church where questions are welcome, people are affirmed, and nobody has to pretend to have it all figured out, learn more at windermereunion.org.
Pastor Brad Jagger | Windermere Union Church | Love Above All