OH. Hmmm.

July 23, 2008 by · 5 Comments
Filed under: Religion, Youth 

This weekend, I’m off with 3 other adults, 2 college students, and something like 8 or so high school youth to the Montreat Youth Conference (week VI) at the Montreat Conference Center in (you guessed it) Montreat, NC.

I’ve been a little nervous about this trip.  So much so that I think I’m annoying our youth director with questions, which he is patiently answering.  I don’t have any good reason to be nervous.  I trust the youth director and the other adults going on the trip.  The college students and youth going on the trip are great and I expect fewer than average problems with them or their behavior (as compared to what I read on Youth Ministry websites).  I’ve heard nothing but good things about the place and the conference from a large number of people.

I’ve been telling myself that the reason that I’m nervous is that the last time I went to a church youth conference was the Youth Triennium in 1986 – when I WAS a youth.  That I was just worried about whether the 40-year-old air-conditioning-loving, out-of-shape, used-to-sleeping-in-his-own-room me could keep up.

While shaving this morning it hit me.

Triennium wasn’t the last time I went to a church youth conference.

Several months after Triennium, I went to a weekend retreat sponsored by some of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship’s NJ chapters.  Here’s what I wrote about that previously:

Back in 1986, I was a freshman at Rutgers University.  On the first day, I was wandering around campus looking at the booths that various student organizations had set up.  One of them near the Busch Student Center was for the InterVarsity Christian Fellowship.  They were giving away ice cream.  I figured that as a rather religious person (at this point I was already a deacon and serving on two Synod committees) I should take a look and find a campus christian fellowship.  The local Campus Crusade for Christ seemed too fundamentalist for me, so I tried out InterVarsity.

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In October I took a retreat with them for a weekend in the woods.  It turned out to be a very cult-like situation for me.  The 48-hour retreat turned out to be (as experienced by me) 24 hours of telling me
how terrible my beliefs are, and then once I stopped fighting them, 24 hours of pouring in their own beliefs.  As expected, those beliefs were strongly conservative.

Fortunately, my personality turned out to be strong enough to resist such tactics.  I made the right noises and they stopped treating me as the “resisting” attendee and moved on to other people.  Once I returned to campus, I never went back to their group again.  And as I wrote before, this was the first step in my turn away from the church

This hit me like a ton of bricks today.  My last experience traveling away with youth to a place foreign to me was a negative one.  While I’ve done some overnights with the youth in the past year, those were either at the church or at Camp Johnsonburg where I felt very comfortable and always knew that I had the ability to leave (since it was at home or I was driving my vehicle).  I wasn’t miles away from home without control over my movements.

Having realized what has been going on in my head, I feel much more comfortable now.  I’m shifting rapidly from nervous to excited.  This is going to be fun!

It’s amazing how things from your past can influence the way you perceive the present.  Not a new lesson for me (by a long shot), but a newly reinforced lesson.

If you or anybody you know will be at Montreat for 7/27-8/1, leave a comment or send an e-mail.  I’d love to say Hi.

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