Storytelling

The staff have finally arrived. Training has started and camp is almost in full swing. This means long days, short nights and lots of tired mornings. My role this summer largely has to do with helping plan out the worship of camp, which we also do during staff training. As I said previously, I really want to impact the campers by helping the counselors to develop their own personal spiritual lives. These worship times this week are designed to impact the counselors personally and help them to see their time here as a time of growth and spiritual development. 

This week, we will spend lots of time getting to know each other and essentially tell our story. This is especially true for myself because I really have never met anyone here before besides my co-intern Hannah. Many of the counselors have been going here their entire lives and have some of their best friends here at camp. They know each others story, but it is also their job to share that story with the people around them in order to bring this staff together as a community.

Sunday night we had our first worship service. We, for the first time came together as a community to point our lives and our minds back towards God. The summer our primary focus is on the campers and camper safety, but what we often forget about is that we are really here because God placed us here for to serve Him. We are not here for ourselves, but for God. To start off the summer we decided to use the worship story to allow God to speak to us. We used no words, no videos, no elaborate sermon, but we just used what God had given to us. We decided to enter into the part of God's story when he first gave us life, when he first gave life to all of creation. 

John, the camp director, had seen a pantomime, similar to what we performed on Sunday night. He offered up this idea and we immediately grabbed on and decided to make it work. I put some pictures below to give you an idea, but basically we were going to visually tell the story of creation. The story where God first created the world and imparted God's likeness on humanity. The story ended with the fall of humanity on day six. Adam could no longer commune with God and it wasn't until God reached back out to Adam and offered up a free gift, the cup of salvation and bread of life, that Adam was able to again touch God. Then "God" and "Adam" (maybe a little theologically unsound) offered up the Eucharist to the rest of the community. It was an amazing presentation and I may be able to post the video at some point once it gets edited. It really allowed the counselors to be reminded that we are all part of God's story. We may not have come here for all the right reasons. Maybe some of the counselors are here to have fun, to meet a girl, to go sailing, or to just have a job for the summer. The truth is though, that God brought all of us here for a reason.. This worship service truly helped remind all of us why we are here. It allowed the staff to begin to see themselves as ministers and part of this larger narrative that God has invited us into.

Another moment in the last few days that I really enjoyed seeing God work was through our Encounters time. Encounters is going to be our experiential bible storytelling time. (Christian education program) It is not supposed to be complicated or hard, but just something that is interactive and fun for the students to learn something about themselves and about God. 

We decided to move forward with this idea with creation and this Encounter will actually be the same one that campers will encounter on their first Monday of camp. This first one has kind of been my thing and I took it on as my own. It was truly amazing to see it all come together and to see how God was truly working through all of it. We invited everyone into the CLC (Christian Life Center aka the hottest place on camp property). We opened with one praise song for the sake of time and then began the activity. We had set up six sheets of butcher paper with paint. Each group had been given 2 banners and would artistically (maybe) depict what they perceived that day of creation would look like. I literally just sat back in amazement in everything working a million times better than I had imagined. It was really cool to see an idea come to life. To see the staff interacting with each other talking about their vision of creation, their interpretation, and what they imagined that it might look like. After they all finished (even though I cut them short) I had them come up to the stage and in order the would stand on the stage, recite their portion of Genesis 1 and then the next would come up. It truly was moving to see how the interacted with God's story and with each other. Ideally there would be a debrief time and discussions within the group, but as usual we were out of time.

I really like this idea of telling God's story through our own eyes and allowing others to speak into that story. We all don't see things the same way, we have different mental images of what things look like and how they all work together. Some people might not think that this kind of activity really counts as "teaching time," but I think it honestly might work even better sometimes. It allows a group to work together, to dialogue with one another in order to play a part in the story. The enter into it themselves and truly become part of God's narrative.