By John M. De Marco
LAKELAND — During summer camp for children and
youth in Leesburg, evening worship caps off a day spent learning,
growing, laughing and crying. It is the emotional high and spiritual
depth-injector that ties together a package of intense God awareness.
As campers embark June 3 on “Mission Possible:
Take the Risk,” parents and friends will have the chance to get a
firsthand glimpse of the campers’ experiences.
This year parents can log onto a special Web
site and vicariously participate in worship through a new partnership
between the camping office and a Fort Lauderdale company. The company
will provide free space on its servers for live streaming video and
audio on Tuesday and Thursday evenings as campers and counselors
gather for worship in the youth camp’s chapel.
“It’s unbelievable. Something like this
normally costs about $5,000,” said Mike Standifer, conference
director of Youth, Young Adults and Summer Camp. “Really, worship in
the evening is a culmination of all of what’s happened during the
day, with music and preaching that, hopefully, by the end of the week
drives campers into a relationship with Jesus Christ or into a renewal
of that relationship. That’s the whole reason we’re at camp.”
Standifer’s office will also offer its
CampParent portion of the Conference Web site, launched last year. It
allows parents to see pictures of camp activities and send e-mails to
their children.
Camp staff typically snap about 250 photos per
day. The streaming video and audio will be added to this component of
the site. Another new feature will be stories posted by camp staff
each day to chronicle the day’s events.
“They literally are able to get a glimpse
inside of camp by digital pictures, stories, message boards, so that
on a daily basis they are experiencing some of what their kids are
experiencing,” Standifer said.
Parents register with their own user names and
passwords so only they can access, or allow others to access, the
information and images in keeping with federal laws that regulate the
appearance of children’s photographs on the Internet. Parents also
can purchase e-mail accounts to send messages that camp staff will
print and give to the campers. Standifer said the changes to the
parents’ section of the Web site, which will relaunch soon, will
make navigation more user-friendly.
Another change to summer camp this year is a
shift in activities at the South Camp in Alva, located about 25 miles
east of Ft. Myers. South Camp will feature a Middle School Group Week
from July 8-13, during which groups and counselors from local churches
will travel to camp together and experience activities as a unit.
The new program replaces an environmental camp
that had begun to dwindle in attendance and will be strongly
influenced by the Young Life ministry, with a different look and feel
than the Leesburg camp activities.
Young Life is a small-group model aimed at high
school students. It began in 1940 and currently operates in
communities across the United States and about 53 other countries. The
groups generally meet once a week in an organized setting that
features music and curriculum, but Young Life volunteers and staff
also interact with kids in a variety of settings, such as schools,
sporting events, neighborhoods and malls.
The Alva facility can hold about 100 campers and
counselors. Paul Marzella, youth director of Grace United Methodist
Church in Cape Coral, will direct the camp.
“An individual camper can come to Leesburg and
not feel out of place at all, but Middle School Group Week is
literally geared toward having existing groups come together,”
Standifer said. “A big part of it is to really build relationships
with the youth and adults that are from your church. That’s not to
say the program at Leesburg doesn’t do that, but this is a totally
different way of doing it.”
The Life Enrichment Center at Leesburg has
conducted a High School Group Week for a number of years, with strong
response. This year’s high school groups will gather July 15-20. |
