Learning to Worship at Church Camp

A conversation with Cara Meredith about camp songs and faith formation

I’ll be honest, most of my memories of church camp make me want to disappear into a deep hole. I remember awkwardly forcing my way into friend groups, hoping I could break in and become one of these girls who French-braided each other’s hair and giggled about boys from other churches. It was a social nightmare.

But I also remember encountering a form of musical worship that I didn’t have at my home church—raucous, guitar-driven hype songs and meditative ballads about Jesus’ sacrifice for my sins, which, should I feel led, I could confess to a group of teary peers. These memories felt newly fresh and a little recast as I read Cara Meredith’s new book, Church Camp: Bad Skits, Cry Night, and How White Evangelicalism Betrayed a Generation.

Photo by KC McGinnis

A few years ago—when the movie musical A Week Away (2021) came out on Netflix—I found myself thinking about the importance of music at church camp. The Camp Rock-esque teen romance highlighted one of the formative power of music in American evangelical youth group and camp culture. A Week Away featured music by CCM icons like Amy Grant, Michael W. Smith, and Steven Curtis Chapman (for real, though, this rendition of “Place in this World” kind of rocked).

For me, and for many church campers of the 1980s, 90s, and 2000s, it’s not the old-guard CCM played over loudspeakers that stands out in musical memory, it’s the praise and worship music, and the ways we learned to participate in it in the context of these youth-centric spaces. Church Camp offers a nuanced examination of a parachurch experience that many American evangelicals share. Cara doesn't shy away from the uncomfortable questions about coerced confessions or camp rituals. But she also doesn’t set out to cast the whole church camp world as a sinister monolith.

Photo by KC McGinnis

Cara is a writer and speaker based in California. She is a postulant in the Episcopal church, training to become a priest. In Church Camp, she offers insight from her own experiences growing up as an evangelical church camp attendee, then leader. She also shares stories of interviewees who are now processing their memories of church camp.

Cara and I spoke about the significance of music at camp and the ways these “set apart” places offer young people a chance to learn to worship separately from their parents and try on new faith practices and identities. I hope you enjoy our conversation! You can buy Church Camp now, wherever you get your books.

I think most of us who went to church camp as kids or adolescents remember “camp songs,” songs we associate with specifically with camp rather than weekly worship in our home churches. What were your camp songs?

I actually wanted to start each chapter of the book with a block of lyrics from a different camp song, but getting the rights to print lyrics is expensive and complicated. There are a thousand camp songs that live in the recesses of my heart. For the chapter I affectionately called “Cry Night,” I wanted the lyrics, “the nails in your hands, the nail in your feet, they tell me how much you love me,” [from “Forever (The Nails in Your Hands)” by Richard Cimino]. It was a total crowd pleaser.

“This Little Light of Mine” was the quintessential song for the last night of camp. You know, you’re going out and leaving camp and trying to be the light of Jesus.

Church camp stands out in my memory as a place where I would sing differently, act differently, and experiment. I was learning to worship by myself, separate from my parents and home church. Was that something you observed, either in yourself or others?

Yes, I think you’re right; church camp was envisioned and designed to be a place where kids could come and be who they are separate from their parents. A lot of the experiences I had were in these ecumenical camps that weren’t denominationally affiliated. They were parachurch camps, outreach camps, so we would have campers who had never heard about Jesus and were hearing the message for the first time, and others who went to church every Sunday morning and Wednesday night.

As a camper, I remember learning to really use my own voice for the first time. I firmly remember learning to harmonize or sing a soprano part. There’s this soprano line in the song “Seek Ye First” that carries over the top of all the other voices. It felt like there was this empowerment and beauty, and even a longing in that—to use my voice for something bigger than myself.

When I was a summer staffer and camp speaker, it was beautiful to watch children come into their own through music and singing. For some of them, that meant raising their hands in worship for the first time, or closing their eyes. Or maybe just being brave enough to sing out loud for the first time.

Photo by KC McGinnis

I’ve been thinking a lot about the spiritual experiences of children in corporate worship. I feel this tension between wanting to question what appears to be potentially coerced participation, and wanting to take seriously the spiritual experiences of children. If I believe that God is present to children and active in their lives, without adult mediation, why would I try to poke holes in their camp experiences?

This book was birthed out of tension, and Church Camp is a book of paradox; it’s about the both-and. Even if I do err on the side of criticism, I love camp. I criticize because I love it.

I do not discount the reality of children singing and being enveloped by God. But I do think that we can easily cross the line and push, and not give agency. There can be elements of coercion or groupthink or emotional manipulation. Sometimes music is used as a tool of persuasion.

As a speaker and a program director, the reality is that we were curating an experience. That may not be true of every camp. I think it’s easy for readers to think, “wow, that woman is such a hater,” but I really do hold this tension. And it’s just the reality that in these White evangelical camp environments, the goal was to make new Christians, to convert.

Success was measured by numbers: the number of kids who asked Jesus into their heart for the first time or rededicated their life to Christ or made a decision for baptism. And I think all of those things are good. But if our goal, the reason why we’re doing what we’re doing is to get from point A to point B, we are going to do things along the way—including choosing songs—to get there.

The right song could be used to invite people into an experience that would lead toward that end goal of conversion.

Photo by KC McGinnis

My kids are young; I haven’t had to deal with the question of whether they will go to church camp. There are certainly parts of my youth group and camp experience as a child and adolescent that I don’t want to replicate for my kids. But, I have to admit, there’s a fear that lives in my brain that if my kids don’t have the same hyper-emotional experiences of camp and youth group, they won’t remain in the faith. And I say that having just written a book about Christian parenting literature and the need to acknowledge the spiritual autonomy of children. I think there’s a little part of me that wonders if I would still be a Christian if I didn’t have those “mountaintop” experiences of evangelical youth culture. I’m rambling now. Is that just a weird fear of mine? Has a thought like that ever crossed your mind? Will you send your kids to camp?

I grew up mostly in the American Baptist tradition and became really involved with Young Life when I was in high school. Those formative experiences in my childhood and adolescence were so important in my spiritual development. And I don’t shy away from talking about that in the book. I am who I am because of camp.

I like to say that I am all of the versions of myself that I have ever been. I am all of the evangelicals that I have ever been. I’ve found a home in the Episcopal church now, but when I identified at evangelical, we looked at those mainliners like, “ya’ll are really on the fence, you’re lukewarm.” It’s so silly.

I do think camp has changed since the mid-90s and early 2000s. If you go ask any camp, they’ll tell you that it’s harder to get kids there. Camp is expensive. The format has changed, too.

But when I think about your question, “will my children be missing out on something if I don’t send them to camp?” I firmly believe that the foundation, what happens in families, is the bigger thing. When my husband and I take our kids to church, I believe they are experiencing just as much as they would at camp. Maybe it’s steadier. There’s a steadiness in walking up to the front every week and receiving communion and the love in this circle of people around them. Do we need the spiritual high of a camp experience? I don’t think we do.

*Note: Photos for this post are from “Mountaintop,” a photo project by KC McGinnis, an Iowa-based photojournalist and communication professor (also my husband).

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Thanks for reading! As always, here are some recommended reads and listens:

My recommended read this month is Cara Meredith’s book, Church Camp: Bad Skits, Cry Night, and How White Evangelicalism Betrayed a Generation. If you are someone who finds yourself occasionally revisiting your memories of faith formation in the context of youth group, church camp, or kids ministry, I think you’ll really enjoy this book. So many of us have complicated relationships with the young versions of ourselves, as we tried to navigate spirituality and faith during such formative years.

Last month, I spoke with Israel and Adrienne Houghton about their new album, Coritos, Vol. 1. Here’s the interview. The album is a welcome departure from the heavier, more anthemic worship music that tends to rise to the top of the lists on PraiseCharts and Multitracks these days. It’s exuberant, musically-varied and models a form of musical worship that most English-speaking Americans don’t get to encounter on a regular basis.