I spent all four of my high school summers volunteering at Sequoia Brigade Camp, the camping spin-off of Christian Service Brigade, with which I had been heavily involved since first grade. I volunteered as a junior counselor, giving up 3 1/2 weeks of my summer each year. It was a great experience. I made great friends, great memories, and great laughs; and SBC, probably more than anything else, was where I learned patience, teamwork, and peer leadership through trial by fire.
We had campfire each night, which always followed a very strict formula (Warm-up, then Fun Songs, then Skit, then Transition Songs, then Testimony, then Slow Songs, then Story, then Closing, and ending with "I Have Decided to Follow Jesus"). The next morning at Leader's Huddle (which started at 6:15 in the morning every day--yikes!), we would always go through a campfire evaluation of the night before. And damn, we ripped on each other. I got critiqued one time for slipping my hands into my pockets during Transition Songs. People got critiqued for not starting on a good pitch. People got critiqued for not having prominent enough hand motions. People got critiqued for being too energetic, or not energetic enough. People got critiqued for not announcing songs exactly as "Song Number, Song Name, Song Number again." People got critiqued for calling a section "Fun Songs," "Transition Songs," or "Slow Songs" (as if those titles were supposed to be kept secret from the campers). If you think you gave a flawless campfire song leading performance, you were wrong--someone could always find something wrong with it. And the standard was never consistent--I saw some errors get repeated that would not get critiqued (e.g. the hands in the pockets thing), or Bob, the camp director, would praise someone's performance even though they had made the same errors as someone else that had been pointed out a previous night. The absolute nit-pickiness, combined with the inconsistency of standards, drove me mad.
I have a memory during either my third or fourth year where I was being evaluated after leading transition songs the night before. Someone commented, "I seem to recall Max not being very good at song-leading his first year, so watching your improvement has been really cool to see." Indignantly, I responded with, "No, I was good my first year," at which almost everyone laughed. That upset me. Because I was good my first year! I was not going to allow my past to be disparaged like that. And apparently, no one else seemed to believe me.
My fourth year, I was a senior counselor. So for one of the weeks, I led my own post. It was a great experience being entrusted with that kind of leadership and the creative freedom to choose how I wanted to run my post. This also meant that I led Bible Exploration with my campers. If I could go back and do it differently, I absolutely would. Bible Ex was for about 90 minutes each morning after breakfast, and I was determined to get through every question, even if my campers were obviously bored and had lost interest. Six months later or so, I watched my older brother lead Bible Ex at Junior Leadership Conference, a CSB event. As a squad, we typically only answered a couple of questions before calling it quits, because my brother thought that we had had a good discussion up until that point. If I could go back and approach Bible Ex in this manner, I absolutely would. I would stop when it was clear that interest had died down, and I would allow tangents if it promoted good discussion. Instead, I forced my campers to answer all the questions in the Bible Ex booklet, which usually ended up filling the 90 minute time slot. This probably left a sour taste in their mouths about studying the Bible, which was totally contrary to what the camp's goal is.
As a counselor, the campfire revolved around the skit. We all pined to be included in more skits, and we spent a ridiculously high portion of the day preparing for the skit (especially the Director's Cut), often leaving our campers to help with preparation.
The positions of "The Craft Guy," "Bob's Assistant," and "Campfire Coordinator" were all highly coveted, because honestly, they involved the least amount of work and did not require direct interaction with the campers. They also had the most time to do skit preparation, so the counselors in those positions were inevitably in the skits more often than other counselors. Also, they were able to hang out with the female counselors (who tended to be super cool) more than any other counselors.
The counselors had an after-hours hang out called S&B (Scarf and Barf), which was supposed to be totally secret from the campers. It lasted from 10-11, and Bob was crazy strict about the 11 PM end time, often unleashing his wrath if we were out past 11. The counselors were not subtle about attending S&B. It was supposed to be kept secret from the campers, but it can't be a secret if two of your post's three counselors suddenly leave as soon as "Taps" was played at 10 PM. During my second year, I believe, Bob used part of S&B time to read to us from a book "50 Reasons Why Jesus Came to Die." That was really weird--S&B was supposed to be a time for everyone just to chill, hang out, and eat food.
It was run very oddly like the military. We awoke and went to sleep every night to a bugle playing "Reveille" and "Taps," respectively. We had to raise the American flag every morning before breakfast and sing one or two verses of "The Star-Spangled Banner" while saluting the flag (and let me tell you, that is not an easy song to sing, much less first thing in the morning, much much less when the camp director always chose a horribly high key). We had to lower the American flag every evening before campfire and sing "God Bless America" while saluting the flag. Our gatherings consisted of formal line-ups, complete with "Alert" and "At Ease" commands. The conflation of Christianity with military practices, in hindsight, is kind of scary.
And, oddly enough, even though I spent so much of my adolescent years revolved around SBC, and it surely shaped me into the person that I am to at least some degree, it's not what comes to mind when I think of influential times in my life. When I was joining AGO and sharing my life story with the actives, SBC never came up.
Meh. This barely counts as analysis. Just a revisiting.
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