The Camp Phenomenon

                One thing that I really picked up on during my time with RiSE this summer, is just how devastating the fear of man is to authentic worship. I spent all summer ministering in camps that present a “sterile” worship environment. Your parents aren’t there. Your pastor isn’t there. The big bad “judgmental” people in your church aren’t there, and because of that, we can all feel free to raise our hands and sing loud praise to God with reckless abandon. The “camp worship experience” has always been something that really irks me, but this summer really changed my view on exactly why it is that this phenomenon grinds my gears.

                I used to really criticize these kinds of people for “being fake” when they go to camp. “Put enough Charismatics in a room, and even the most fundamental Baptist will start to lift hands.” I thought that the responses that I was seeing were a result of peer pressure that was coming from the environment. We worship differently at camp, so I naturally thought that the problem was the way we worship at camp.

                This summer really changed that for me, particularly my first week after I got home from my time with RiSE. During the 8 weeks that I was on the road, I grew significantly in my ability as a worshipper. I think that worship is a skill that we hone, and I really made good progress in that area. There’s something about constantly being in different venues, and with different people, doing different songs with different instrumentation that sound different through different sound systems, and making last second changes on the fly, that really cause the means to become very insignificant in your mind. You don’t have a “method” to latch onto because the method is always changing. I was in a place where I felt like I was truly worshipping more genuinely than I had in the past. That is, until I got home. Fresh off of a great last week of tour, I walked into church Sunday prepared and anxious to worship with a body of believers that I was actually a part of, rather than just a guest in. I was greeted with what is possibly one of the most dead, and lifeless worship services that I have ever been a part of. There are a host of details that contribute to this (that I’ll be glad to share, just not now), but the main one that I saw was just a sickening fear on the part of those who were “leading” worship. Fear. They looked absolutely petrified. And the worst part is, it started to get to me. I wasn’t worshipping. I was too frustrated.

The fear of man. Everyone is so worried about offending one of my means-driven brothers and sisters, that no worship is actually done by those on stage. As a result, no one in the congregation worships either because they don’t see it modeled. Then my poor pastor had the “privilege” of getting up and preaching a beautiful exposition of God’s word, that accomplished nothing because the climate of the church had already been killed. It was about as effective as putting a steak dinner in front of a corpse.

Needless to say, I see things a little differently now. I think that what we see at camps might possibly be what worship should look like. All the obstacles are removed. It’d be amazing to see what that looks like if it actually happened within a long-established community of believers instead of a group of teens who are together for a week.