Community Plus Camp is a huge, week-long event. Located at Camp Kookaburra in rural Victoria, the camp spans six days and five nights and is jam packed with activities for the youth of Australia. This year, we made everything BIGGER by adding 18 international visitors from the Sierra Pacific Mission Centre (think California, USA) to the event.
Each day was packed full of fellowship, learning, singing, campfire, games, quiz bowl, deeper conversations, cultural sharing, food, kickball, low ropes courses, running trivia, basketball, giggles, more food, dishes, bracelet making, scripture study, collaborative gaming, prayer, articulating appreciation for each other, cabin time, late night chatting, archery, volleyball, zoos, candle making, priest of the parish, jailer, communion, more food, sardines (the game, not the food), team work, old friends, star gazing, love, understanding perspectives, new friends and so, so much more.
When it comes to planning youth and kids’ camps, I feel like an old hat. And every year I come back to the same thing—none of it matters.
Don’t get me wrong, the event itself is unbelievably important and formative in the lives of each individual child or youth that attends. We ensure it is a place where they feel welcome, loved and accepted to be their uniquely quirky self. In fact, we encourage the quirky sides that often get hidden in other spaces. Living fully is way more fun.
Often, it is a place where people feel more accepted and valued than they do in most other places of their lives. It can be new and uncomfortable. Some don’t know what to do with that feeling while others thrive. Others look forward to these moments all year so that they can tap into their ‘deeper mode’. Even as adults, we often look back on experiences like these and recognise how they have shaped the people we’ve become.
The part that doesn’t actually matter is the specific activities or the particular details. No one has ever come home and said, “Do you know what made camp so great this year? Each trivia question was cut out right on the lines!” or “My favourite part was the way our rotating groups never bumped into another group. It was seamless!”
You need to have activities at camp in order to have the between the activities at camp.
Generally, when you ask the youth their favourite part of camp, it is the friendships they have made or deepened. It is the personal jokes that have been developed. It is chatting over meals and chilling out. It is the kindness others have shown them, and the opportunity to show gratitude for the presence of each other in their lives (yes, this one is an activity, but I would call it more a ‘slightly facilitated, highly expected opening of opportunity where the youth will revolt and insist if not included’ activity). Sometimes it is simply ‘the feeling’. My favourite part was always the late night, dark cabin chatting.
If you make them dig deeper, they can eventually name an activity they enjoyed. But it always comes back to the people and the feeling of love and acceptance they find. For those that are churchy, we might call this “connection to God” or living out the peaceable kingdom.
I often describe experiencing God as when something is so much more than the element of its parts. When dinner with friends isn’t just dinner with friends, but phenomenal, deep soul connection with genuine love, laughter, care and good food. That is what experiencing God can feel like.
That is Cplus Camp. It is living in community for six days with 36 other people. It is just that, and yet so much more.
Kass Unger
