Servant Leadership: A camp love story

St. Paul's Lutheran Church, Waverly

 John 15:9-17

In summer staff training at Ewalu, we charge our staff with a very simple, but challenging directive: Just love your campers. It is a calling illustrated in places like John 15, where Jesus says, “Love one another as I have loved you. Now, that is an awfully high standard. After all, God loves us the way we ought to be loved. Amazingly, it happens at camp—again and again, it happens—campers come to Ewalu and experience God’s love for them, and they go away calling this special place, “Home.” That is a miracle.

            Nevertheless, I do have a certain fear when we talk about love. I’m afraid it will quickly become… fluffy—love, love, love, that’s what it’s all about. Nobody will disagree with that! And nobody will disagree with it because merely talking about love demands nothing of you. Love that does nothing is not love at all. We have to do more than tell kids they are loved, pat them on the back, and send them home. We have to live it. Love demands an object and action. It is never theoretical—you can’t love a theory and you can’t love in theory. Love requires commitment to those we say we love.

A strength of camp is the fact that everybody who comes to camp comes away with an experience. Of course, we aren’t batting 1.000—we don’t always hit a home run—but we do punch above our weight for making a difference in these kids’ lives. We are successful in large part because we provide so many avenues for connection, which is important, because our campers are not one-size-fits-all. Each is a unique child of God. What is holy to me is not holy to every camper or staff member, and vice versa. I love the Maquoketa River—full of beautiful trout and clear, running water, with the occasional turtle and beaver, mayfly hatch and sucker run—but plenty of kids come to the same river and see mud and leeches and crayfish with those pincers, and they say, “I’m not getting in there!” You let some kids play in the forest and they come alive, building forts and setting their imagination on fire, while other kids feel claustrophobic under the canopy. Some kids love singing around a campfire; others only care whether or not there will be s’mores. Some love high ropes—some are terrified of high ropes—some start terrified of high ropes and end up loving high ropes.

Thanks to St. Paul's, Waverly for your support of Cedar @ 60!

The reason camp works so well is, firstly, because of the love that permeates the work we do, and secondly, it is because we offer so many different places for that love to be experienced—so many avenues to connect with God, with the natural world, and with one another.

            I spend a good amount of time meeting folks across eastern Iowa, and whether in churches or community meetings, or even chess tournaments and mountain bike rides, inevitably someone will see me wearing an Ewalu shirt and gush about their experiences with Ewalu. The really neat thing about this for me is that it is never the same; they have as many reasons for loving camp as there are campers who have passed through. For some, it is the place; the sacred ground they walked upon. For others, it is the people; the lifelong friends they made. For others, it was experiences of faith and the hope that others will share in that life-changing experience. Still, for some it is just a feeling associated with their time at camp, and it is hard to put it into words. I understand. It is hard to put into words, because love is hard to put into words.

Three weeks from now, summer staff will be gathering and getting ready for campers. These young adults come to us dedicated to service, excited to grow, and also unsure of what to expect. Every day—every hour—brings something new. It is not an easy job, and Lord knows we don’t pay enough for what they do. Still, they come for many reasons: Because we have a committed Christian community the likes of which they have not experienced elsewhere—because they are allowed to be themselves in a way they cannot at home or at school—because they feel fulfilled in the good work they have done and know the difference they are making. They come because they have encountered something so beautiful they cannot help but share it.

            Young adults come to us because they want to serve, and service is love in action. In John 15:15, Jesus says, “I do not call you servants any longer, because the servant does not know what the master is doing; but I have called you friends, because I have made known to you everything that I have heard from my Father.”

            I got into outdoor ministry through service. I was college freshmen, following friends on a service trip out to Shoshone Base Camp in the Idaho panhandle. Out west, I fell in love with mountain streams and ponderosa pines, but more than that, I fell in love with an ethos of joyful service that I associate with every Lutheran camp I have ever experienced. I felt it when I was a 6^th-grade camper at Lake Wapogasset Lutheran Bible Camp in western Wisconsin, and I experienced it perhaps most poignantly as a counselor and offsite trip leader at Lutherhaven in Idaho, then again in servant leadership with Pathways when I was a pastor in northwest Minnesota, and again when I was called as Executive Director of Red Willow Ministries in North Dakota, and finally to Ewalu. Servant leadership is the backbone of what we do, and it is through this good work that Jesus calls us no longer servants but friends.

This is actually a revolution. Jesus doesn’t call you his students, or his advisees, or his padawan, or anything like that: Jesus calls us his friends. Let me tell you something we all should know from our first day in kindergarten: Friendship is criminally undervalued. Maybe you have seen the meme that reads: Jesus’ greatest miracle was not walking on water, or feeding 5000, or even raising Lazarus from the dead. No, Jesus’ greatest miracle was having twelve friends in his 30s. (One of them did betray him to his death, but 11 out of 12 is still pretty good.)

            This interplay of service and friendship rests firmly in the heart of this passage about love. For me, it took that first experience of service at an outdoor ministry in Idaho to understand how this all works—how God’s love doesn’t show up because we deserve it, or because we are nice, or because we say all the right things, or because in our hearts God knows we are good and faithful. Rather, God’s love shows up when we pour ourselves out for others. The more you give, the more you feel it. We empty ourselves of our self-importance and God fills us with love.

            This is why we do what we do at Ewalu. It is why our summer staff come away exhausted but fulfilled. By all accounts, camp shouldn’t work. You shouldn’t be able to put a bunch of young adult college students, who barely remember Confirmation (if they had one) and have roughly two hours of theological training, in charge of squirrelly children living out in nature for a week. That doesn’t seem to be a recipe for faith-building and leadership development. Nonetheless, not only does it work, it is the strongest evangelism arm of our church.

            This summer, our camp theme is “Created to Be,” which mirrors the ELCA Youth Gathering. When the daily themes were revealed, one in particular raised some eyebrows, which is Friday’s theme: Created to Be: Disruptive. I have to admit when I first saw that theme, I took in a deep breath and did my best Scandinavian, “Hmm… that’s interesting.” Are we really created to be disruptive? If anything, I do my best to make my children less disruptive. Then again, when I look at camp, I see one giant disruption to kids’ routines. My experience of service leadership was disruptive. For our college-aged summer staff, camp often disrupts their career paths. All service disrupts the prevailing worldview that says you should only ever give something with the expectation of getting something in return. Love says something different: We give graciously because of what Christ gave us, which is life in all of its abundance, like a river that never flows dry.

We have images of that at Ewalu, too. That’s just it—everything in the natural world preaches to this love that God has for us—and ultimately, that is what calls me so strongly to outdoor ministry. We serve intimately within the world God created and called “good.” We experience it in service—we pass it on to all God’s campers who may have never felt it before—and we come to you today to remind you of this great work we are doing together. We share God’s love—we engage in joyful service—and we change lives by disrupting the currents that would otherwise sweep us downstream. And then we sit by the river, watch the trout rising, and rest in God’s grace.

Thank you for your support of camp and thank you for being God’s campers, whether you have ever been to Ewalu or not. May you be filled with the love of God and feel the joy of servant leadership—then, may you know deep in your soul that you are called “friend” and when you can’t believe it, may you rest in God’s grace.