KCO (Kids Campout) for the win.

The weekend of March 26-27 was the Uniting Church's Kids Camp Out. Every year, the Uniting Churches of South Australia gather those kids who want to attend from the grades 2-7 for a one-night camp. With some 2000 people attending this year, it's a pretty massive event. Usually, the kids come and take over a large RV camping park. Each church is responsible for supplying its own lodging (tents) and food for the whole event. There is programming for the entire time, but there is quite a bit of downtime as well to just hang out as a church family. It is an interesting setup. I enjoyed it.

Anyways....Hope Valley was sending a portion of its children along with a whole mess of leaders. I was asked by the children's pastor to go along. He knew of my experience in camping ministry and thought I would be helpful with playing games and general entertainment of the group during downtime. Since I am here to serve and it would be a good opportunity to get out of the city, I agreed.

The day before (25 March) was spent busily preparing for the arrival of the kids. In the morning I helped Dave, the children's pastor, gather a few things together and hook up his camper. By mid-afternoon we had left with a whole carpool of about eight guys to set up our campsite. We drove into the Barassa, which is a famous wine region of South Australia and very beautiful. Upon arriving at the site, we began setting up the tents. We barely had enough loaned to us to house all of Hope Valley's kids (nearly 60!). We set up four tents for the girls, three for the boys, one for food storage, and a big pavilion to eat under. It took us several hours and we worked up an appetite. Dave went and bought us all pizza as a thank you for volunteering. The pizza was delicious (and ought to have been at $23 a pie).

Most of the guys took off for home after dinner. A few of us just stayed overnight, as we were needed the rest of the weekend. Dave brought his camper up. So for the first night, I had a comfortable couch to sleep on.

In the morning, I moved into my tent (ugh...I hate tents) and the kids started arriving. I helped with registration and getting things around. The rest of the weekend from this point was dominated by programming. I will spare you the minute by minute and just give the highlights and observations.

1.) The food was amazing. Our church did such a good job feeding these kids well (and me!). Australians seem to take a million-and-one different breaks for food: breakfast, tea, lunch, tea, supper, and dinner before bed. That is a lot of food!

2.) Remember when I blogged about Iced coffee? Well let's just say that there is no way on this planet that caffeinated, sugar drinks should be sold to children without limit and at low costs. No. This is wrong and an abuse of all volunteer staff.

3.) One of the other Uniting churches from the country, Lameroo, had arranged a while back to share meals with us for the weekend. Hope Valley has a huge barbecue trailer for such events and Lameroo didn't have the resources we did. So we had all our meals with these really interesting kids from a small country town of South Australia. I thought the partnership was great between a well-resourced city church and a country one.

4.) Though the camp is for kids, grades 2-7, it seems most of the programming could only appeal to a younger set of kids. I was in charge of a group of older boys for the weekend (see above picture). They were way too "cool" for all the (admittedly) childish things the camp was doing. I think the KCO board needs to consider how to better pour into the older kids. Either that, or acknowledge that you can't and don't invite them. It was a wrestling match the entire weekend to get the boys interested and engaged. I can honestly say that I failed in this.

5.) Since this was not a Hope Valley event, but a Uniting Church event, the content was a bit suspect. I have already told you in this blog that the greater Uniting Church is fairly liberal and open-minded. The camp reflected this tendency. There was no real gospel message, no real attempt at evangelism, no altar call, no concrete Biblical teachings. This really bothered me, as I believe ministry must hinge upon these things. Camping ministry, where you only have kids for a short time, needs to hinge on these critical sort of teachings.

The religious theme for the weekend was "I Wonder." When all was said and done, the central message of the camp was that if we ask questions about God and "wonder" about Him, it proves we are interested in Him and wanting to know Him better. What sort of a vague, wishy-washy message is that? I know plenty of people that wonder an awful lot about God and never come into any sort of an understanding of how a relationship with him ought to look. I was bothered by this quite a bit. Where is Jesus? Where is the gospel? Indeed, when I got in front of all the kids (which i will get to in a second) and mentioned that Jesus loved them, it was almost as if a shock went over them. It was one of the only times Jesus had been mentioned the entire weekend. Now, maybe I just don't understand how to evangelize in Australia. Perhaps the KCO leaders are well intentioned and have thought this all through. I will not assume I am right. I am sad to think, however, that this is the direction such a fine evangelism opportunity would take.

6.) Dave was constantly asking me to lead games and songs with the kids. I was happy to do this, of course. I love working with kids and I love playing around with them and watching smiles inch across their faces. It reminds me of how much childlike joy and faith we ought to have when we approach God. The kids loved my games and songs. I pulled out all of my old Camp Michindoh favorites (thank you Michindoh for such valuable training).

7.) But word had gotten around that I was pretty good entertaining and working with kids. One of the leaders of the activities (not the teachings) for the weekend, Renee Orchard, was actually a Hope Valley lady. She approached me a bit earlier in the week and asked me if I would be willing to emcee an aspect of Saturday evening's programming. Without realizing what I was getting myself into, I said yes.

This is was how things went down: At night, the whole mass of kids were to be split into two groups. One group would stay at the main stage and watch an Australian singer named Sean W. Smith (apparently quite famous in children's church circles). The other group would go across camp to another area for a time of activities titled, "It's a Knockout." After a bit of time the two groups would switch. Renee had asked me to emcee "It's a Knockout." What I basically had to do was lead a bunch of silly games for the adult leaders to do on stage and the kids to laugh at. I would fill time, select adults victims, explain the games, encourage applause, and the whole works. Ok....sounds easy, right?

Well I got to thinking that day about the likelihood of entertaining a bunch of kids solely by letting them watch others play games. Even the funniest of games could not keep a kid's attention for 45 or so minutes. Right? That is what I thought anyways. So I asked Renee if I had the liberty to add in my own things, tell my own jokes, get the kids involved in some songs and activities themselves. That was cool with her.

So I arranged to get a hands free microphone (a must for someone as energetic as I am) and ran through sound tests and the whole works. Each group I would be speaking in front of was nearly 1000 people. That's outrageous! Imagine little me, standing in front of hundreds of screaming kids. I have never had to entertain that amount of people. I have to admit that I was really nervous (to the point of throwing up).

But the long and short of it was that everything went fine. I pulled out all the stops I knew to keep the attention, boost participation, and help them have a good time. I had to yell nearly the entire time though, as I had kids cheering and hollering for every second of the games. It was good. I almost felt like a natural up there.

I was introduced, made a few jokes about America, and started in on the games. These were just plain silly. We had a doughnut-on-a-string eating contest, a game that involved shaving another person's face blind-folded with a plastic spoon, a wacky cross-dressing relay--etc. In between the games I would tell jokes or get the kids going crazy about some aspect of Australian culture (like Kangaroos and "lollies"). When I felt I was losing their attention, I got everybody up to sing a silly song or play an easy game like Grrrahhh. The kids loved it all (I hope).

It was a real rush for me. I even got a gospel message in (which seemed to shock them, as I said above). Right when I came on stage I said something like this: "I came all the way from America because Jesus loves me and He wanted me to tell you that He loves you too. He loves you so much he died for you. And because of that we are forgiven, we can live free, and we can have fun. Which is what we are about to do..." You know, something really simple like that. I didn't think much about it at the time. The next day, however, I started asking random kids why I was at the camp. Their response always had to do with that statement. It had sunk in! They didn't look at me blankly or say something strange, they told me it was because I loved Jesus and wanted them to know that. God used just a sentence to make an impact on some lives. With that in perspective, all the yelling, nerves, and spent energy were repaid thousands of times over.

I wish my friends back home could have seen it.

8.) I didn't sleep a wink that Saturday night. Seriously, I doubt I fell asleep at all. Which was funny because I was sleeping on a cot. My back was just killing me the whole night. Perhaps I am just getting older than I want to admit. There is no reason why my back should have hurt so bad--I am 23!

9.) I completely and utterly lost my voice by the end of the weekend. After playing games with the Hope Valley kids and yelling over the collected voices of thousands more at "It's a Knockout," it was gone. I guess my vocal chords are not in the same shape they used to be when I was working with kids full time at camp.

10.) People were very grateful for all that I did that weekend. I received so many thank you's and compliments. Some people were even saying that my activities had saved the whole KCO experience (a fact I am not claiming). Everywhere I looked, the kids were singing the songs and playing the games I had taught them the night before. I reckon they all went home to their churches still singing and playing. Perhaps I single-handedly annoyed every parent throughout the Uniting churches of South Australia. Haha!

In all seriousness though, it seems I did leave a legacy. Maybe they will want to fly me out next year to lead the camp in "Boom Chicka Boom." :-)

A few days later, there was a message left at the church telling Hope Valley how great its "new minister" had been with the kids. That made me laugh. I am just a punk kid who doesn't know where his life is headed. I am honored and humbled. God be praised. Also...I thank Dave Turner, Steph Riebe, Terry Bayer, Eric Knauff, and Camp Michindoh in general for teaching me so much about working with kids. I don't think it is a natural gift of mine.

So that was KCO in a nutshell. I had a great time with the kids and just pouring the love of God over them. I was upset about the evangelistic focus of the camp, but some things you can't change. What I am responsible for--bearing witness to the truth of Christ's love--I did.

Sleep on Sunday night was great :-).

In Christ,

Chris