Camp Chanco is alive with the good news of Jesus' love
The
summer camping sessions are in full swing at Camp Chanco. As some of you may know, I have made Chanco my
residence this summer. This decision has
given me the opportunity to greet, meet, and make friends with the permanent
staff, the seasonal staff, the volunteer counselors and with all of the
children who attend the camp sessions.
When
I was about 10 years old and attended my first summer camp session at Kanuga
Conferences in Western North Carolina, I had my initial introduction to the positive
effects of our Episcopal Church camping programs. Though I did not know it at the time, I was
being given an in-depth immersion to my formation as a baptized follower of
Jesus.
This
summer I have been thinking a great deal about the opportunities we have at
Chanco to form girls and boys as followers of Jesus. The pervasive theme we are using this year with
each session of campers is “The Way of Love.”
Though our theme was inspired by Presiding Bishop Michael Curry, I
believe that through the diligent work of our planners we have taken it a step
further to enable the campers to live out actual loving behavior with the other
staff and campers. The idea, and we have
to be explicit about this, is that such behavior connects them with with the
love of Jesus, a love that culminated in his sacrifice upon a cross,
resurrection and ascension.
Forthrightly,
this is evangelism. Recently the British
Archbishop of York, Dr. John Sentamu said, “I’ve got a particular motto:
‘evangelize or die.’’ In and through our
work with our campers we are encouraging them to have a living relationship
with the risen Lord Jesus Christ. This
is a good thing, a very good thing! Whether they know it or not, our camp staff members
are fulfilling the roles of evangelists.
On the website for the Church of England Diocese of Leicester, the
following reflection upon the Archbishop Sentamu quote: “Without evangelists a
church could easily become a fossil...” (1)
I
believe that God is in the business of calling many of us to be evangelists, followers
of Jesus who engage others in conversation about the love of Jesus. Theologian Walter Brueggemann captured this
theme when he wrote, “…God calls ‘men and women of all ages, tongues, and races
into his church.’ The call is not to join an institution or to sign a pledge
card; it is rather to sign on for a different narrative account of reality, one
that is in profound contrast to the dominant account of reality into which we
are all summarily inducted.” (2)
On
July 27th we are sponsoring a Diocese of Southern Virginia visioning
day at St. Andrew’s, Newport News. The
theme for the day is “Deep Roots, Wild Branches: Re-missioning the Church from
the Outside In.” One focus for the day will be to explore how we can partner with
one another and with persons of other Christian faith communities to
communicate the Good News of Jesus. This is particularly relevant as we think
about persons for whom our Christian faith is new information about a new way
of being. Indeed, we are eagerly excited
about the possibilities. More than a few
of you in the diocese have asked me what this will mean and what it looks like
to be a Good News communicator (AKA “evangelist”). My response to them has been that I do not
know. However, I do know that our baptismal
calling is to make ourselves available to the guidance of God in and through
the Holy Spirit to be transformed into the Christ followers we are called to
be. Perhaps some of us, as stated in the
Epistle of Timothy, are to “…do the work of an evangelist…” (II Timothy 4:5, NSRV)
+Jay
2. W. Brueggemann, ‘’Evangelism and
Discipleship: The God who calls, the God who sends’’ in P. W. Chilcote and L.
C. Warner (eds), The Study of Evangelism (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans,
2008), p. 222.
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