Our First Camp Committee Meeting

The first meeting of the “Grupo de Consejo” or Camp Committee took place on Saturday, January 19th and it went very well. Everyone arrived around 9:30am – the designated starting time and had around 20 minutes or so of conversation and refreshments before the meeting officially began. We began with a time of worship and prayer led by Dale Horst, a Canadian missionary, and then spent some time explaining the purpose of the day as we wanted to make it clear to everyone that they were here at the formation of something new but still transitional. One of our goals is to develop a committee that will take over the responsibility for most of the camp needs with Kelly and I being a part of that group. At some point in the future we anticipate that ownership of the camp will be transferred to the Ecuadorians but there are many things that need to happen before that takes place.

The next key step for the day was to spend some time reflecting privately on God’s Word, so we gave them two passages to study with questions to help direct their thoughts. The passages were Ephesians 4:1-6 and Colossians 3:12-17. Their instructions were to find a private spot somewhere on camp property, read the passages, pray, and if they had anything to put right with a brother or a sister, to do it. We wanted to stress the importance of starting out united with all personal problems dealt with. This was important as there has been some friction between various individuals as they tried to deal with camp responsibilities without an administrative couple being onsite during the last year.

With the issue of unity through forgiveness and love having been dealt with it was time to move on to the vision for camp. Many people have expressed their ideas, or personal visions for how this camp could be used so it is important that we get a clear picture in our minds as to how as a group we see things going forward. With that in mind we read Tim Horne’s vision for the camp and stressed that was his original vision but that it was important that we as a group had to develop our own. If we have a vision that we reach as a group we will be far more likely to pursue it rather than one that belongs to someone else. We assigned homework, so that everyone could have an opportunity to reflect and put pen to paper in an attempt to encapsulate our personal visions for the camp.

One of the key concerns that everyone had as we had talked to them individually over the previous weeks was the lack of organization and communication that has been detrimental to the ministry over the last year. It seemed like a good thing to do to remind everyone that God is a God of order, that he created the universe that way and that he stresses the need for order in his church and by extension works such as this camp. So we began by looking at three verses: Colossians 2:5 which states “For though I am absent from you in body, I am present with you in spirit and delight to see how orderly you are and how firm your faith in Christ is.”; I Corinthians 14:40 in which the apostle Paul also states the need for order “But everything should be done in a fitting and orderly way.”; and the first half of I Corinthians 14:33 which says that “God is not a God of disorder but of peace.” This prepared the way for us to talk about possible camp organizational models.

I had prepared a series of 8 diagrams or organizational models demonstrating a number of different ways in which we might organize ourselves structurally. The purpose was to get the group thinking about what might work best for this group here. Tim had stressed to us as we were coming down here that we had a blank sheet to work with so we purposefully left model 8 as a blank sheet. After we had gone through all the advantages and disadvantages of the various models everyone came to the same realization – that we were going to design our own based on the vision that we have for camp, based on the personal gifts and abilities that we have in the group and to a certain extent, based on the way that things have developed so far. I stressed that we were not going to choose a model today but take some time to pray and reflect on that. However, we did split into 4 groups of three to discuss what the blank model 8, our future model, might need to look like. As we gathered together afterwards it was interesting to see that three of the groups had decided that we needed a variation of model 7 in which the committee authorizes sub-committees to deal with a handful of key responsibilities like administration, programming and camp maintenance and construction. The fourth group’s model wasn’t very different so it looks like we are heading towards a consensus.

We finished off the meeting with a time of prayer and a decision to meet again this coming Sunday, the 27th, to agree on a model and begin to decide how we are going to divide up the various responsibilities.

As everyone jumped on the bus around 4pm, Kelly and I watched with a strong sense of accomplishment. The meeting could have gone any number of different directions but we were well satisfied to see everyone leaving together with smiles on their faces and an obvious sense of relief that things were moving forward. I was especially happy that my Spanish had held up well throughout the meeting ….. but then Kelly had been praying that it would!

I am sure that there will be much discussion amongst the various individuals about concerns that they still have but if we have accomplished nothing other than getting them moving in unity in a direction towards a goal that they can understand and believe in then we will, I believe, have accomplished a lot.

On another note! For all you pet lovers! The camp is slowly turning into a zoo! As you may recall we inherited Kuma the German Shepherd camp guard dog. We have since added two kittens, Leonardo and Picasso (bad things happened to the first two that we had)… and, surprise…so far they are still alive and with us. Beethoven, a Rottweiler puppy has since been donated to us by some kind folks that heard that Kuma was depressed after losing his doggy companion “Viejo” to old age a few months back. Add to that the fact that the Horst’s dog, Ginger, has been visiting for a few days and you can imagine that feeding time is quite interesting with every animal eating out of another’s dish. Actually there is only one way to describe it….. crazy…. absolutely crazy!

Verse for the day:

Genesis 31:46-48

“He said to his relatives, “Gather some stones.” So they took stones and piled them in a heap, and they ate there by the heap. Laban called it Jegar Sahadutha and Jacob called it Galeed. Laban said, “This heap is a witness between you and me today.” That it is why it was called Galeed.”

These two men, Jacob and Laban, built a pile of rocks to be a witness to the agreement that they had made with each other at this spot. Presumably it remained a marker for some considerable time before it fell apart or was demolished by someone who knew nothing of the agreement that Jacob and Laban had made. I would imagine that it is very unlikely that it still stands today. However, the story remains preserved for us in the Word of God and is an example of how two relatives managed to work out an understanding despite some very strong differences. Are there people or even close relatives with whom we have had disagreements and with whom we have failed to work out an understanding? These two have left us an example of how they prevented what might have become an outbreak of violence between them and they left a mountain of rocks and a bible story behind to prove it.