LAKELAND — For 16 years, Hispanic families from across the Florida Conference have gathered for a weekend of camping during the Labor Day holiday to celebrate their faith and heritage and learn ways to reach out in their communities.

The focus of this year’s Sept. 4-6 "Campamento de Familias," which means Family Camp, was preparing families for ministry in the new millennium, according to the Rev. Catalina Borbón, a diaconal minister, director of education at Lakeview United Methodist Center in North Miami and director of the Florida Conference’s Hispanic Family Camp program.

The theme for this year’s event was "Con Cristo Hacia el 2000," or with Christ toward 2000.

"The purpose was to prepare for the next year, for the end of the century," Borbón said. "We wanted to prepare the families for the new year, beginning always with Jesus Christ."

The Rev. Jackie Leveron, pastor of St. Andrews and Wesley Chapel United Methodist Churches in Ft. Lauderdale and this year’s family camp chaplain, said there was a spirit of renewal at the event, with an unusually large response to the altar calls and a higher than normal attendance at daily devotionals.

"I think it’s the Holy Spirit calling people and preparing people," she said.

The program began in 1984 when members of a community outreach program at Lakeview United Methodist Church and a youth group from Peace United Methodist Church in Miami met with the common dream of creating a ministry that would reach out to and strengthen Hispanic families in the Florida Conference, according to Eugene Rodriguez, president of the Florida Conference Hispanic Committee on Ministries.

Meeting at an ecumenical camp in Florida City, the first family camp attracted approximately 200 people, according to Borbón. The program relocated to the family campground at the Life Enrichment Center in Leesburg in 1987 and has been there since. More than 360 people attended this year, with some family members from as far away as New York and California.

One purpose of the camp is to give younger people an opportunity to meet and develop relationships with other members of their church family, particularly Hispanic people of the same age, Borbón said.

The program is also designed to teach and motivate laity to reach out in their neighborhoods. "There is training in evangelism and going out…Lay Speaker training and Faith Sharing," Rodriguez said.

Other elements of the camp experience include Monday evening worship service and "Quinceñero," a coming-of-age celebration for children who have turned 15 during the previous year, Rodriguez said.

Leveron said this year’s camp makes her optimistic about the future because of the large number of youth and children involved in the program and the response of all participants to the spiritual elements of the weekend.