8 Chapter 8: A Conversation with Steve Venable

Conversation with Steve Venable

Director of Ministry, Ceta Canyon Camp, Amarillo, TX

Instructor, Asbury Seminary Trail Camping Course

December 7, 2003

I’m the Director of Ministry at Ceta Canyon Camp, which is a Methodist-related camp outside of Amarillo, Texas. I handle programming aspects of the camp, and so I do things like the Challenge Course— operate the challenge course— and then we have probably about eight retreats a year that I coordinate; and then also backpacking and the off-site things that we have as well, I’m in charge of those. So, we do a lot of backpacking trips, some with youth, some with men. Those are the pertinent parts of my job description, though I have lots of others. I typically run the backpacking trips myself. And typically the only place where I have hired staff is on the Challenge Course, where I hire and train the facilitators.

Why do you do what you do?

Well, I really have reflected on this a lot, I mean, a lot. I think the best thing I can say is I stumbled into the outdoors as a means of escape. I had two things I was trying to escape. One is I grew up in suburban Dallas, and we had a creek behind our house (so we weren’t completely set in concrete, or anything), but the backdrop was a really crazy family life, and it was worth escaping. And so we would go, my brothers and I would go into that creek, and we owned a little bit of the property there— but it’s all city, don’t get me wrong. And so then I just stumbled— it’s almost like I fell into all these things backwards—stumbled into Boy Scouts, stumbled into some friendships there that were worth keeping, and the next thing I know I was just doing it on a regular basis. I was camping and backpacking on a regular basis. It was nothing I did with my family, they never participated with me.

And I think I had a sense there, that life was better.  And that life kind of, I don’t know, I’m going to sound real corny— I think I just want to stick with the word escape, from this normal thing that we call life, and the grind of it, and the hurt and pain associated with it. None of that was there in that little camping trip. Out to this little lady, her name was Mrs. Sharp, and she’d let our Boy Scouts camp out on her farm. It wasn’t five miles out of town, but it wasn’t there, it wasn’t there, the pain and the hurt wasn’t there, and it was a good escape. And I think it opened my eyes to see that there was more to life than what I was… even if I’d been in a good family and I had a good situation and all, I think the outdoors still opens our eyes. It would still open my eyes to see there’s more to experience in this life than where I am and what I know. And so in that sense, it broadened my horizons, but I think it was to get away from this that took me outdoors, first of all.

I had a couple of mentors in Scouts. I became good friends with my scoutmaster and his family.  And he was good to encourage us. He encouraged me; I had a personal relationship with him. It wasn’t a big troop anyway, but he was very much an encouragement. And my first real backpacking trip was through the Scouts. We went on monthly campouts, and weekly summer camps each summer for a week, and things like that. My first backpacking trip was at Philmont, through the Scouts. I was 16 in ’77, and he very much encouraged me to go, and the other leaders there encouraged me too. And then it wasn’t ‘til much later when I was in seminary, and Don Joy, who’s the professor at the seminary who started this backpacking course— this Discipleship Development course— I went on a trip with him.  He became my advisor at seminary. I was in Christian Education, which was his field (my minor in my Master’s program was Christian Education). And so, he encouraged me; he very much encouraged me. So it wasn’t until then that I really had somebody who said, “Come on, you can do this. As a matter of fact, you can do this really well,” and stuck with me through it.

Going to Seminary, was that something you always knew you would do?

I think so. I felt called to it—to pastoral ministry. I had kind of a gnawing sense of it for years, but I really felt called when I was 17. And so, I had visits with my pastors and associate pastors, things like that, about, ‘what is seminary all about?’ Kind of got a feel for some of the logistics of what it would take. I only had really one picture of ministry and that was standing in the pulpit on Sunday morning to preach, and make sure somebody’s teaching your Sunday School classes, and things like that…. and that was good, that was where I was and I needed that. But one of the things that encouraged me to go to Asbury [Theological Seminary] was that they had these classes that they offered in outdoor ministry. One of the only seminaries that offers it— there are several other Christian graduate programs, undergraduate and graduate programs, that offer camping specialties and things like that. Like Wheaton has a graduate program in educational ministries that specializes in camping ministries. But in terms of seminaries where you’re going for a Master’s of Divinity, and you think I’m going to end up in a pulpit somewhere in a local church, those seminaries that offer that kind of degree, that are approved by your denominational body for ordination and those kinds of things— it was one of the few seminaries that offered outdoor training.

So did you already have the notion in your mind that ministry for you might involve an outdoor… 

Yes, but I’m a real unreflective person, it takes me years— it’s kind of like my wife’s stew, you put it on to cook and two or three days later it’s ready. You know what I’m saying? It’s ready, it’s really good, you know? Anyway, I really reflect on things for years. I mean, I’m just the last one out of the gate, I’m the last one to the prize, but I’m ready when I get there. I’m okay, I’m ready. And so, I graduated from seminary and took my first church in ’85. In the summer of ’85, so I didn’t do anything with camps that year. Starting the next summer, in ’86, my wife and I started working with the camp where I’m on staff now. And we became volunteers for a week of camp, we became co-directors of the junior high camp. And starting the next summer of ’87, I started co-directing a backpacking trip for high school kids. And so, we did the 6th and 7th grade, the junior high, residential camp. We still direct that camp every year, one week every year. We had about 350 this past summer. That was from ’86 until now, and then from ’87 ‘til just a year or two ago, I was doing annual backpacking trips through the conference where we’d get kids from all over the Methodist churches in that conference and we’d take them backpacking—I did that for several years. And then recently I started taking kids from my church where I was pastor. I didn’t do the conference trips. I’d just turn to my church and say, “How many of you guys want to go backpacking? Let’s go backpacking.” So I think I had a notion early on that the outdoors   was important to me, but not ’til I got to seminary did I have a picture of what that might look like. And things have grown and evolved since then. And it’s been a beautiful thing.

In the beginning, on the backpacking trips, specifically, there were other people who were doing it, and I just came along beside them. And I would help lead the trips with them. The official title, I’d be a co-director of this trip. And I did that for several years, and it would be different people. One year, I would lead it with this guy and then next year I would lead it with this guy, and there are a few people who stuck with it a few different times.

But then I felt like I was ready to lead it by myself, but more than that, I also felt like I’d seen the kinds of things that were happening in these kids’ lives. We’d have 20 kids go, sometimes more sometimes less, but usually around 20 kids come. And it was good that they came together from different churches, and they got to meet new friends, and that was a positive thing for community. I knew in the back of my mind that could happen and deepen relationships in our local church— get these kids, and the adults from our local church. And so that became real clear to me, and that’s when I started— I felt the nudging of the Lord to do that. And so, I was the leader. I would take adults, most of them had never been backpacking a day in their lives, and these kids— maybe some of them have been backpacking, maybe some of them haven’t, usually not, though— and we’d just go every year while I was there. And maybe I’d move to another church. There were times when I moved to another church, and these kids from the last church would still want to go backpacking with me. So I’d say, “Well, y’all come on, let’s go backpacking. We can teach these other guys how to do it.” So I did that sometimes, too.

And so, I saw a couple things happen. One thing was that it was just really good for me to get into their world via the wilderness—getting out of both of our worlds. It was also good for the adults and the kids and their interaction, and kind of deepened those relationships. They got to see the Real McCoy—nobody’s putting on airs or smiling even though they’re not supposed to, so there wasn’t any of that sort of stuff. And we got to witness firsthand, 24 hours a day, so to speak, what the Lord was doing in their lives.

I’m pretty informal about what we do, but we would have Bible studies, we would have sharing times, things like that— it wasn’t real heavy structure. I mean, I came at it with a clear idea of where I wanted to go, but I don’t think it was too heavy-handed. But we got to see those kids grow and run with that and make some changes after they got back, too. To see them just right in front of your eyes, just watch them grow and flourish and take other kids with them, that was why we went. And it seems that what those kids needed was the same thing I needed, too, because for years I would come back refreshed. But then it got to where I would come back, and this was the disturbing part—I remember when it started, it was in ’98. In ’98, when I came back from a backpacking trip, I couldn’t sleep. I didn’t sleep any the night we came back. And some things had gone on in church: a couple of people had died, the Church of Christ pastor died, and a lady in our church had died. So, I had to hurry up and get ready for her funeral. But it happens every time now. When I get back from a trip, I’m just so disoriented I can hardly sleep, I lose weight. I’m not talking about on the trip. I’m talking about when I get back. I lose sleep, I lose weight, I’m disgruntled, I’m hard to get along with— you can call my wife and ask her.

And I think it’s a combination of things. I’m happy about what happened, but I long for more of it, and I long for the openness and the realness of that community. And lately, the last few years, I’ve been taking more trips with men than I have with high school kids, and it’s just become more pronounced. I had a group at the end of October, and I got back and I couldn’t sleep. I got sick. I mean literally, I got sick. I was impossible to put up with. And the trip was a fine trip, it went really well. But I think I just wanted more. I don’t know. There’s some stuff written on re-entry, and I’ve read some of it, I don’t know. It’s just hard to know, hard to put into words.

I’m talking about reincorporation. There’s a book by a husband and wife (A Hiker’s Companion: 12,000 Miles of Trail-Tested Wisdom by Cindy Ross and Todd Gladfelter, Mountaineers, 1993).  They were thru-hikers on the Appalachian Trail. But it’s meant to be kind of a guidebook for youth, I mean, not about the Appalachian Trail, or any one particular place, but just, here’s some stuff that you need to know. It focuses on an urban audience, and it looks on urban hikers. And it has a chapter on re-entry, that’s what they call it, and they gather some stories and some suggestions and different things. And whatever transformation is going on in my life, I think that in more trained developmental language, whatever has gone on out there, well, I’d rather put it in biblical language: “from glory to glory,” from 2 Corinthians 3 (being transformed from one glory that’s been set aside to the glory of seeing God face to face in Christ). I used to go out for the beauty of the wilderness; now I go out for the relationships. And whatever happens in the midst of those relationships doesn’t fit in my office, or even in my home, to a certain extent.  And so, I can either go back to being the person I was before, or I can make it fit. But the process of making it fit back home has become more and more painful to me. And I don’t know why.  That’s just my little quirk. And I don’t know, I’ve talked to some guys I’ve taken backpacking trips with and none of them have experienced it, so I think, “Well, I’m just strange.” It’s good, it’s all good. Everybody knows at my house; they kind of just expect it. And the other thing is that I’ve upped the number of trips. I used to take one or two trips a year, and now I’m right at four trips a year, and that’s good. It just creates more, whatever this dis-equilibrium is…. it just generates more opportunity. It’s an opportunity to work with it .

So now that you’re at the camp, are you still pastoring a church?

No, I’m not.  In the Methodist church, the Bishop says, “You go there.” I asked him if he’d appoint me to the camp, and he did, or the camp director asked him. I don’t pastor a church like I did. I have a different expression of the pastoral role, like with these retreats that I work on. So my backpacking trips are more open-ended now. But I’ll invite my friends and people who have gone before. And so it’ll typically be a mixture of people that I already had an existing relationship with and new people that wanted to come for one reason or another. So, I started my own trips (as opposed to conference trips). So I’m back to that deal. But most of these trips now are adult trips.

And the volatility isn’t there. I’ve got a file of youth who I’ve taken on backpacking trips who came from some volatile families and had some volatile issues in their lives. And the parents call up, and they saw “wilderness trip” in the conference information, and they thought, “Oh, this must be like that, you know, get ‘em straightened out boot camp, kind of thing.” You know? I mean, I can’t tell you how many kids I’ve had— I mean it’s a sad state of affairs. I can’t tell you how many kids I’ve had who are on anti-depressants or even stronger medication than just our normal line SSRI anti-depressants. They had chemical imbalances, had strong emotional imbalances. And now, did the parent tell me? Oh, of course not. And we had some real strong issues there a few years, some real hard trips, dealing with this. They come and they don’t bring the medication. And I’ll find out about two days into the trip, “Well, actually, I didn’t bring my medication. I left it at home,” or in the van at the trailhead or whatever. So it seems a little less volatile with adults. Probably not, but it seems that way for me. Anyway, I’m just saying, I wasn’t ready to deal with that risk, but I’m probably a little bit more ready to do it now. It’s probably more self-reflective with adults.

Do you advertise?

Just through the local churches. I send out an email, for instance, every month, from the camp. It will note different things that are going on at the camp— different programming aspects and maybe even fundraising information. And then sometimes to some of the bigger churches, I’ll send out a CD I’ve made that you just drop into your computer, and it will have some information, and registration forms, and maybe some photographs, kind of a slide show, five or six different components that are sort of unified in that little piece of software. But I don’t spend a lot of money on advertising; mostly it is word of mouth. We filled up some trips just through emails alone or through the website. That’s how the word got out.

Our gear situation has worked out really well. Our Methodist conference office back home—everybody’s in a budget crunch, everybody’s kind of paring down. So they had a lot of gear, and I’d worked with it for years on these conference trips. But a couple years ago, they wanted to get rid of it—they were getting rid of a lot of things. So right after I started working at the camp they said, “We were wondering if you might store this gear, take this gear for us.” And I said, “You bet I will.” I can outfit 20 people, no problem: backpacks, sleeping bags, tents, cook sets, stoves, and some miscellaneous stuff thrown in there too, some water gear. I’ve even brought it along to outfit people in Kentucky for the Asbury trips. And it’s nice because sometimes people don’t have anything, they can’t even spell backpack, so we can have all that ready for them. It’s really nice to have all that stuff just sitting there and ready to go at a moment’s notice.

Before, we could rent it or get it from the conference, or we could get it from the university Rec Center or something like that. Or people would scrounge some up or whatever. I’m real low budget though. And when I send out a gear list, I put asterisks on everything, saying, “Please don’t go spend any money. I didn’t mean it that way.  If you have some nice boots, something that will support your ankle, that’s the only thing I’m really asking you to spend some money on. We can improvise anything— bring a frisbee, let’s eat out of that.” So, we really do kind of improvise a lot of things. But it’s always been there, so now it’s just under my direct control. I don’t have to rent it. I don’t have to reserve it. It’s out there; I just go get it. It’s really nice.

So what do you do when participants register?

I just send them information, and I make personal calls. I usually will call them, talk to them, make sure we’re on the same page. But I don’t usually have a pre-trip meeting. That’s a different thing working with adults, too, you know? This one guy this last trip—I don’t do as thorough pack check-downs, for instance, and this one trip back in October we went to the White Mountain Wilderness in Southern New Mexico, and he said, “I think I might come back one day.” And I said, “Well that would be good.” He said, “But I’m not going to carry all this stuff,” and I said, “I told you not to carry it this time.” And he said, “I know, but now I know myself.”  You know?{laughing}We’d told him about it. I mean, you can talk to adults, and then you can say, “Well this is the best that I know right now in terms of what to bring in your pack. But you can bring whatever you want. You can bring that anvil over there if you want to or a microwave oven, whatever works.” And just leave it to them. But with the high school kids, you say, “No, you’re not taking that.” You don’t have to say it that way, but you can say it well and have a little bit more sway on those kids. But probably these guys who take what they want, they learned the lesson a little bit better. One day that high school kid that I told not to take that extra pair of blue jeans, he’ll go backpacking some other day with his friends when he’s in college, and he’ll take the blue jeans. And then he’ll get wet and remember what I said, and it won’t be because I said it, it will be because he’s figured it out himself. Anyway.

So, like I said, I’m a real minimalist on all this sort of stuff. Even when I do the class at the seminary. This last year we had nine seminary students and 21 high school students. And my goal is to be invisible.  The best evaluation I’ve ever gotten from that trip was, some of the seminary students and I were visiting after the trip, and one of the seminary students said, “Well, the kids in my trail family were— they loved the trip— they had just one question.” And I said, “Well, what was their question?” And he said, “They want to know what you were here for.”  That’s what I want to hear. That’s perfect. It’s absolutely wise to disappear.

But in empowering the seminary students, many of them have never been backpacking a day in their lives, many of them don’t own any gear, and we have to round them up some gear. But I don’t grade them on their technical skills. I don’t grade them on how compactly they keep their tent site, or on how many times they missed the trail marker and got turned around, or something like that. That’s not important. Or not that it’s not important to me, but it’s down the list. I want to empower them for ministry first and foremost. We do enough of an orientation towards map reading and those sorts of things. We do enough of that, and then we learn by doing the rest of the time.

They read that Reed Curtis book. Reed Curtis is at Princeton, and he has a book on backpacking, a backpacking how-to book. That’s what we’ve been using. I think I’m going to change it to another book, Backpacker, that’s published through the Backpacker Trailside series—I can’t remember that lady’s name right now. They just came out with a second edition that I really like.  But anyway, the point is, so they read this stuff, they reflect on, they even write a paper about it.  But the seminary students, I want to empower them for ministry. And then [empower them to] just get by, in a sense—I hope I’m not sounding stupid here—give them enough information to get down the trail, enough information about blisters, on how to deal with that, enough information—like their first aid and CPR, I make sure their certification is current—so they can take care of the physical needs of the campers and backpackers. Then after that, it’s real low-key. It’s about ministry. And the environment is very conducive to the ministry, for several reasons.  So I’m just not real uptight. I mean that’s not my style.

And as far as first aid, I have more certifications. Our camp is under Texas Department of Health Guidelines. And so if we’re more than 20 minutes away from the terminal side of an ambulance call, you have to have at least 40 hours of training—in Red Cross, it’s called First Responder.  And so, I went and took the Red Cross First Responder course. Then I have Wilderness First Aid, but not my Wilderness First Responder. I was going to go in January and do that, but it didn’t work out.  I have a lot of different pieces of the puzzle.

Tell me more about the seminary trip.

It’s a summer class, Discipleship Development. The trip is a five-day trip, and it’s been handled different ways. Basically, what we do is I’ll be in contact mainly through email and by phone with the seminary students, and there’s a contact person at the seminary, one of the professors at the seminary, who can gather them up, and we’ll have conference calls and we’ll break into working groups. And they’ll get a lot of the work done: get some curriculum focus going and get started maybe writing some curriculum. Our theme this year was Knowing God and Knowing God Through Creation, Knowing God Through Your Family—knowing God, what are the ways God reveals himself to us. And it was really healing, at least I thought it was really good, and they did a good job of it.

Maybe there will be two or three students who are familiar with the area where we backpack there, the Red River Gorge, and so we’ll have some guidelines in terms of what kind of trails we want to be on, how many hours a day we want to be on the trail, what we think we can handle, things like that. Then that working group will set the trail for me and write the trail description guide because once we get on the trail, we’re going to be in trail families of about eight. Five high school students and three seminary students is ideal, really pack them in there with community, almost overload them. We’re trying to create community, so let’s tip it to our side, so five high school and three seminary students in a trail family. And they’ll see each other on the trail, and they’ll see each other in the morning— we’ll camp within earshot of each other, and we’ll eat meals together, but we hike separately. And then there are other working groups, food and things like that. And then when I get there, we’ll have a few days together of orientation and wrap up all these things that the working groups have been doing. And then I’ll have some instruction I give them, just on what I would consider kind of a minimum body of knowledge for being out there in the wilderness. And they’ll have taken their classes, first aid, CPR, or they’ll have their certifications.

And also during that pre-trip time, they’ll be helping recruit the students who will be going. And we use a pretty wide network of churches and alums, and people like that, to provide the students. We had 21 this last year, a total of 30 in our group. It was a really good trip.  So we had this trail group broken into four trail families. And this isn’t a wilderness area— the Red River Gorge has some roads wrapped through it— though it does have a wilderness, the eastern side of it is the Clifty Wilderness. And we kind of went through it for a little bit, we went through mudstone. And it’s a little different experience from some of the other trips, so that’s more powerful. But I prefer designated Wilderness Areas.

Afterwards the students do a write-up on the course. It’s a three-graduate-hour course, so the seminary has certain guidelines about how many pages you have to read per hour and those sorts of things. We meet the classroom expectations just because we’re out there for a week. And I have a little bit of time with them beforehand, and they do the pre-trip planning. So they’re busy.  But they have to write, and they have to read. I think I’ve been having them read three or four books lately and some journal articles, I try to keep that kind of current. And then they’ll write some reflection on the books and articles they’ve read. And usually that’s not any more than about 10 or 12 pages total.  And then they have a post-trip reflection paper.

But they’ve poured themselves into writing the curriculum. Maybe they each shared a topic— I’ll do this part, you do that. So then, I get all the paperwork afterwards. They’ll email it to me by a certain date, and I’ll grade it from there. And so the grade component is basically 50% participation in the trip and watching them in ministry, watching them give themselves to the kids and take those opportunities to the Lord, however they present themselves. So it’s different for each kid and it’s different from, I don’t know, from street corner evangelism or whatever. It’s a different environment; it requires a different— you have to listen, you have to pay attention. But anyway, that’s 50% of the grade, and their paperwork is the other 50%.  I’m an easy grader. If they poured themselves into the trip, I don’t hold anything back. If they pour themselves into the trip and can prove to me that they read the stuff with a half-decent reflection on it, then they’re going to get a good grade.

But I tell them pretty much first off, “I’m not going to grade you on how efficient a backpacker you are, my emphasis is on the ministry. And if you’re worried about making a good grade, don’t. ’Cause I’ll give you a good grade if you pour your life into these kids. And don’t do it because I said that, because you’re going to get a grade. Don’t even do it that way. Don’t ‘do ministry’ to get a good grade.” It’s really an awkward situation to be in, but a lot of seminaries are that way. A lot of seminary supervised ministries, “Am I doing this for a grade?” So most of the students are used to that, and they’ve already reconciled themselves to this. I’m not doing this because it’s a course requirement or because it’s a grade, but I’m doing this because this is worthy work for the kingdom. And then, we have a process in the seminary for bringing those students back the next year, and then they can take more— there’s a second class that they can take. It’s also a three-hour class, it’s called Subject Development and Program Planning, and they can take on more of the leadership, especially before the trip, and then I can be a little bit more hands off.

And the second-year students work together with the first-year students— they’ll all be together.  They’ll backpack with us too. But they’re kind of like student leaders, among the seminary students they’re kind of like teaching assistants, that’s an appropriate title. They have a demonstrated heart for ministry, a demonstrated desire to be in ministry in the wilderness setting, and so they’re just kind of coming back for more. We had some students re-take the class, and so, we’re the last to catch on, the seminaries are. So we said, “Well let’s do this. Let’s give them credit for retaking the class.”  So then I’ll have them read some books like, I just got Alex Kosev’s new book called The AMC Guide to Outdoor Leadership, and it’s really a pretty good book. I haven’t read the whole thing, but I’m really enjoying it.  Or John Graham, Outdoor Leadership, published in ’97, and it’s a good book. But I like it, I like it a lot, and have them read some of those kinds of leadership books. I don’t have any Christian publications of that sort, you know. So I have them read some of those sorts of things, a little bit more focused on leadership in the wilderness. And then, like I said, they’re learning on the ground, in the field, on the go. I’m in Texas, and they’re in Kentucky with these students. You know? It makes sense that they’re doing a lot of that hands-on stuff. And they still have the professor up there who’s kind of coordinating things, and a pole of gravity sort of gathers around him. But they all report to me, so it’s a good situation.

The curriculum that they write is for trailside lessons. We do three different components. Over the last few years—I’m starting to get a little tired of it, but I don’t know exactly where to go—we do three different components to the curriculum. One is a morning solo time, it’s kind of a guided quiet time, about 20 minutes. There might be a little scripture reading, there will typically be some scripture, maybe a real short text, and then some questions that they’re answering, this is in their journal. And we’re not picking up these journals, or anything, but that’s the morning quiet time. They’re by themselves, the group’s over here, and they scatter from there. Then on the trail, in the morning or sometimes around lunch, it just depends on how they want to do it, we’ll have about an hour trail-stop Bible study. And then in the evening, skip all the way to bedtime now, we have what we call ‘Tarp Talks’ (we don’t use tents, we use a tarp for the trail families). And so, it’s dark, they’re kind of ‘under the cover of darkness’ there, and it’s intentionally designed to bring out their own personal story and their lives. And so we might have some leading questions, like, ‘to really know me you have to know that the stupidest thing that I ever did in my life was….’ or ‘the greatest thing that ever happened to me was….’ and they’ll go around, including the trail leaders, the trail family leaders, and share stories.

Also, we’ll have a worship service. And the three main components of that, first we would have some singing, worship through song. Then we’d also have somebody, one of the trail family leaders (one of the seminary students) share briefly. I’m talking 10 minutes. If they go longer, you know, it’s not about pounding something into somebody’s head. If they can’t figure it out though, it’s good to codify it, it’s good to crystallize it. But, anyway, ten minutes. And then we have what we call a Story Stick, and it’s just a walking stick. And we do different things with walking sticks from time to time, but sometimes we just have the walking stick, and we just pass it around, and if anybody wants to share something from their own life, or maybe a memory that was triggered through the events of the day or this particular worship service, then they can do that, or they can just pass it to the next person. And typically, not every time, but typically, the percentage of people that actually do share something from their heart grows as we go further into the week. Of course, there’s always an extrovert, who loves a chance to talk, and there’s always somebody who gives their nice church answer.

We missed that one year; we didn’t do that. We kind of started it late, we tried to do it later in the week, but nobody was buying it.  It was imposed, you know, it was crazy. But if you start that at the very beginning, the very first time you get together, and you have a Story Stick right there with you, they just say, “Oh, that’s what we do here, okay, sure,” and they just kind of pitch in on it because a natural part of getting together is just talking about their lives. Who doesn’t want to talk about their life? A few people don’t, but most, give them permission, and then it’s just a beautiful thing to see how the Lord draws all that together in a redemptive fashion.

So that’s the three primary components to our curriculum, and then interspersed with that is the worship time, ending with the story stick. And then we always conclude with a closing rite of passage, which might take any number of different shapes or forms depending on where we were going in the first place. But it’s a symbolic re-enactment— you don’t have to live like a kid anymore— you’re a teenager, whatever a teenager is. If you want to be an adult, this is your opportunity to rise to that occasion. And we try to make it very personal. It has both an individual and a corporate component, and the individual component is always different. One time we had the trail family leaders bring one particular student up who is from their trail family, and so whoever’s trail family this guy was in, they would talk about him, they would recount some stories through the week, or some things that they had seen in this particular high school student. And it’s very personalized, it’s not a bunch of trite, “Oh, we’ve got to say something nice.” The seminary students knew a month ago they were going to do this, so they’re ready. They’re praying, and they’re watching even for the crazy things that happened or the things that went wrong to see the good things that bubble up out of that. It’s true for all of us, but I think that those high school students, they get lots of things, they get told a lot of things, they get a C on their report card, or whatever, they get told all the time what they’re not doing right, so we try to focus on the positive. And then as they come in, we’ll bring them in one at a time but they don’t go off anywhere, now they’re there to help join in affirming the other people, the other members of their trail families. It becomes kind of a crescendo, almost. That was how we handled it one year.

And then we did some other things that year. We had some, I can’t remember exactly, but we washed their feet. The trail family leaders would wash their students’ feet and then as the students came in, one or two maybe, then they would join in as well. And then, as a closing, after everybody was in, we’d close with a time of communion, holy communion.

One year we had walking sticks, everybody had a walking stick – they were responsible for it – and they carved on it.  Each day they’d carve something that represented something out of their childhood.  A negative thing out of their childhood, not a positive, this was a negative – we’ve done it both ways — and then burned those sticks. We had a bonfire; we burned those walking sticks in the fire.  We’ve done one where—this is with Don Joy, and it was one he kind of worked on—and we had a cross set up and they were lashed to the cross, and then they were laid out here on a ground cloth and we covered them up.  You know, sort of like they’re dead, and then somebody came and got them – so it’s sort of a death and resurrection. It was a very tactile, very sensual reenactment.  Some of the kids were raised in church, some of them weren’t, but some of them had heard these stories before, one or more times up to a million times, but now they’re living them out, in a real sensory way.

So, anyway, those are the primary components on the seminary trip. It’s all based on that rite of passage model: taking them out, finding out who we are while we’re away. That’s the leverage—I hate to use that word—that the wilderness gives us: we get to leave so much behind.  We get to leave all the unimportant things that we probably thought were important behind and get down to essentials. And when we’re all in this situation together, young and old, me and you, and these high school kids, too— it affects us all— we’ve all left our life behind. It creates this new kind of common denominator and a kind of openness to each other that I don’t find in very many places. And it can create an openness for some negative things to happen too, where some of our negative characteristics come out. Whether you have a bully, or whatever. But typically, it brings out the best in us.

Victor and Edith Turner, some sociologists—they did a lot of writing on pilgrimage and rites of passage. I refer to some of their stuff in my DMin (Doctor of Ministry) dissertation. But they call this new group that’s been formed— they have a couple different words for them depending on the context and where they’re going. One is communita, or little community, which is a new little community.  And they mean that in a real positive, almost spiritual sense—the ties that bind them together are more than just what they share in common about their ways in the wilderness, but it’s their vulnerability, their humanity, and what God’s doing in their lives, even if you can’t say, “this is God at work in my life.” But then another way they use to describe it, if what we have out here in this world is structure, then this is anti-structure. Together we build our own anti-structure.  I’m not much of a Survivor show fan—my kids watch it every now and then, I’ve seen parts of one or two episodes—but I thought, “That’s what they’re doing. And these people, these TV people are going in there and intentionally destroying the communita that’s being formed.  They’re getting paid to go in and destroy the community that could have been in there, and pit them against each other, give that person immunity.” I mean, literally, I’ve seen less than an hour of Survivor, or any of those shows, but that’s what they’re doing, they’re intentionally destroying relationships that are created in this kind of wilderness group.

You know, we’re humans, and we’re fallen, and so even in the best of situations we have problems. The conflict can take care of itself. It’s kind of like stress— we don’t try to introduce additional stress. There are some programs that do. Typically, as a standard practice, they introduce additional stress into the environment. See, we don’t want to do that. I don’t want to do that. I’m sure I have, but I don’t want to do that, and I try to avoid adding stress to an already stressful situation. There’s enough of that in whatever you do. But there’s enough of it in the backcountry, there’s enough of it if you’re worried about the weather, there’s enough of it if you’re allergic to the food, or whatever. There’s lots of different things that pose a challenge.

What do students bring to that rite, that ritual?

It’s handled in different ways, but they are typically asked to respond. How do you respond to this? I mean, right in the middle of it, how do you respond to this? You’ve been a leader on this trip, and you’ve brought out the best in each person here, and we see God at work in you, almost shepherding your trail family— what do you think? What’s stirring in your heart about all that?

And then in response, we’ve had them go everything from just hardly being able to say anything at all, whether it’s overwhelming or whether they just reflect inwardly or whatever. Any response is appropriate. Almost all responses are good. We always have different things.  We tell them going in that we don’t have a response that we’re looking for; don’t say anything because you think it will make us happy. And this is the end of the trip, and they’ve hopefully figured that out. Hopefully we’ve actually said it and lived it, and hopefully they know it. But anyway, anything from not saying anything at all or saying very little, to making or almost reflecting on a life decision. Is God calling me into some sort of ministry? We’ve had kids ask, ‘Is God calling me to become a pastor?” We’ve had kids, you know, who said ‘I felt God leading me in this direction in my life,’ in different situations. To go back and be in ministry to their parents, where they felt like, “Well, my parents didn’t do this, and I have these deficits in my life.” Well, why don’t you go and minister to them? For us not to tell them, but for that just to arise out of them  —it’s up to me to love my parents. We’ve had kids speak out of their hearts, and given up on something they wanted. Hope is thin on their dad’s loving them, but can they love their parent? All the way through to kids having a salvation experience, coming to know the Lord for the first time. Or however you want to say that, coming to know and accept, and to take on personally the yoke of Christ for the first time.

And like I said, there are so many different ways; there’s not one way to do a rite of passage. This last year, this summer, 2003, we took some scriptures out of Revelation— one talks about the people and in the other place it’s Jesus. The kids were given a white stone with a name on it—I think when it’s talking about Jesus he was given a white stone with a name on it that nobody but he himself knew—and so, we handed out these white stones to everybody and there was some reflection from the trail family leaders about what they’d seen in each other. And then we asked them to respond, “What is it that you’re seeing? Where is it that you see, what do you think the Lord is doing in your life?” And we’d say something like, “What’s your name?”

And last year, we did it in our trail families and then we came together, so I don’t know what happened. As a matter of fact, it was kind of funny, right after the trip, I had the opportunity to call my wife before we kind of evaluated the significance of things, and she said “Well, how did the trip go?” I said, “I don’t know.”  Seems like it was 8:15 pm when we broke up into our trail groups. Supper was late for whatever reason, so it was almost 8:15. So I asked the trail family leaders—we were all sort of milling around, and they knew we were going to do something. We’d done something every night, so we told them all to go back to the campsites, we’d do something there. So, I got the trail family leaders, and I said, “It’s 8:15 now, do you want to keep them ’til 9?” And one of them said, “How about 9:15? An hour, that will do it— an hour is more than enough.” Well, they didn’t get back until 10:30 pm. Honestly, I’m not lying. You can be sappy for an hour and a half, or you can be real for an hour and a half. So, all I had reported there is what other people talked to me about because I wasn’t there. And I hadn’t had the right to be there. I was that guy who was standing over here, you know what I’m saying? If I did any part of my job correctly, I’d empowered the seminary students to go, I tried to pour out my life to their lives, and they went and did likewise.

And on that trip, we had several kinds of groups of kids: those all came from the same church and these kids all came from another church, and we split them up. We had quite a few “well-churched” kids, but we had some non-church kids, too. So some of them were reflecting, some of them came back and they were reflecting on those sorts of things— Boy Scouts do it a lot— where do I go from here? It’s almost disorienting but in a positive way, in a positive way. I think they’ve already generalized that after the rite of passage. And the kids feel empowered to take some measure of control— I’m not talking about getting away from your parents or anything like that, but to say, “Yes, God is speaking to me. He is my ally. We’re in this together, and where do we go, where do we go from here?” This is called grace, and it has to do with the powerful reality of having God on your side and having God there with you, becoming a child of God. So I don’t know, but different things have happened in different ways. Those are just some examples of some of the bridges that we’ve crossed.

Do you always end with communion that night?

Yeah, that night. I can’t say that we always do, but I think that we almost always do.  We use intinction, where we have a common cup and a common loaf, and I would hold the bread and you would tear off a piece, I would hold the cup and you would dip it in, and you eat the sopping bread. It’s a very ancient form of communion. I don’t know how commonly it’s practiced in churches in America.

It’s the shared experience. And we don’t do a lot of ritual with that, but we do some. In the United Methodist denomination, we’re not encumbered by requirements to serve communion one particular way or by using one set of rituals. We have more flexibility in that— good, bad, or you can call it whatever you want to.  But for us, you can be completely away from any sort of ritual or contextualization, but we still like to contextualize that experience, the kind of moving up experience of the rite of passage, into the moving up experience that the disciples encountered on that Passover meal. When Jesus said, ‘This is my body, take and eat. This is the blood of the new covenant,” [he communicated], “I’m not going to drink it anymore but every time you drink of it, I’ll be there.” And so, he was empowering them, he was kind of bringing them up a level, so we try to put it into that context .

The seminary students on this trip knew this a month out. I said, “You’re going to be with your trail family, but you’re going to be spending some quality time— okay, here’s all eight of us sitting in a circle, a campfire or whatever, but I’m not going to run from this person to the next person, I’m going to spend some time talking to each person, sharing with them.” And the groups have three leaders in each group, three or four leaders. Some of those leaders had even gotten together ahead of time, and they would say, “I really feel drawn to this one kid,” and they’d say, “Yeah, well we’ve seen…” You know the Lord had just brought their spirits together, or whatever. It had been a serendipitous connection, and “I’d really like to say something.”  So he would kind of take the lead, or she would kind of take the lead with that person. I’m not saying it has to be real organized like that, and that’s not even the height of organization, but they just kind of, it just emerged, and these seminary students, guys and gals both, they would get together, and maybe even during a break or something, they’d pray together about how they would handle it. And we would offer some guidelines, and together we’d worked out some guidelines. But the way it specifically got worked out in each trail family tended to be a little different.

But so that time, all the kids from that trail family were there for the entire experience. And so that was real positive. I don’t really know what the downside is to that, since I wasn’t there. It wasn’t for me; I didn’t do anything. But that was real positive, real personal. Like I said, it took 2.5 hours, just right at 2.5 hours. And they all kind of appeared from four corners. I mean it wasn’t like they were all over there and came in together.  They were all in different places, and they all appeared together. That was just spooky. And then we finished up, we shared a little bit collectively (that’s when we handed out the rocks), and they spoke to that question, “Who are you?” And we asked, “Who is the Lord calling you to be?” and “What are you going to do about it tomorrow?” Because the parents were coming to pick them up in the morning. What are you going to do about it tomorrow? And then we had communion together.

I do a lot of the same kind of things in trips with my congregation. That’s where I was kind of first working those things out. I remember one year we did the walking sticks, and they carved in them— they could carve whatever they wanted to. It had to be memories of their childhood, but it could be positive or negative—it was just kind of a variation. And then we had a fire going, and we had a cross here that we had lashed together. We kind of just gathered around the fire.  And then instead of burning those sticks, we had a bucket of water, and we washed the sticks, and it was cleansing. And so the good and the bad, we celebrated it all, and that was sort of almost a baptism for those things that had gone on in their lives. I don’t like to focus on the good stuff or just the bad stuff, especially just the bad stuff. I almost refuse to do that because I know there are lots of people—adults, kids, all ages, you know— a lot of bad things have happened to them previously, plenty of them. But the Lord has kind of poked through that, somewhere. Can we find that place too, you know?

That’s what we did that year. And we had them share something off their stick, if they wanted to—they didn’t have to, that was kind of their permission—and everybody shared something.  And that year, we also did this: we used the scripture out of 1 Peter where it talks about your faith as more precious than silver or gold. And so, I had a friend of mine who’s actually now the trustee at my camp (he wasn’t at this time though), and he makes these crosses out of horseshoe nails. One horseshoe nail makes the center piece, and then he bends two others, and he lashes these together with wire and then just drills a hole through the top (the center one) and makes a little lanyard. I painted them gold to represent the gold that we had been talking about. That was the theme that carried us throughout the week. And we gave them to them that night after that service, as we took communion we gave them the crosses. And these are kids from my church, right, and some of them were there every Sunday no matter if it snowed or rained, or their parents were gone or whatever, and some of them maybe they came, maybe they didn’t come. We got back from the trip on a Saturday. The next day, Sunday, every single one of them was at church, and every single one of them wore their crosses. I mean, I didn’t say anything. I promise, I said nothing. Every single one of them wore their crosses. And so, I just had them get up in front of the congregation and a couple of them shared, just briefly, what they got out of the trip and somebody else came and prayed for them. It was real simple, you know, it wasn’t really coordinated or complex at all. And it certainly wasn’t anything that I’d set up. I’m not near smart enough to ask them to do that. I just don’t think that way, but the Lord had tied all that together.

And it was good for the congregation, because a lot of people think, “Oh, they just, whatever, they’re not really… I’m sorry, my pastor’s not really right in the head; he does these strange things.” Really! I mean, make apologies for you, I’m being serious. And so, it was a real turning point in that congregation to see these adults and youth up there, who had something of value to say. They didn’t just say, “I had a good time with a lot of Christian people, and it was really swell.” They had something of value that had deepened their lives. So that was two years ago, and that was the year I reported in my DMin dissertation (I also used a spiritual well-being measure to examine the impact of the trips on participants). So, I had them keep journals, and I said, “I am going to take these up, but your name’s not on it, so I won’t be able to associate it with you, so you can write as little or as much as you want to. You can tell me off, or not, and I don’t really care. I do care, but I just want you to be honest.” So I had some written evidence of some things, of their reflections on that trip, and tried to kind of summarize the meaning of that.

Do you do the rite of passage with adult men trips?

No, I really don’t.  I haven’t had enough years and enough trips to reflect on how to do that. We do some real good sharing, and I usually bring a lesson or something I want to talk about and we do it in a collegial sense, in a completely corporate sense. And yes, I put my two cents worth in, and yes, I provide direction, but I really try to be collegial. We’ll do that in the evening, and it seems like almost every night, an individual would kind of surface and become the focus in a positive way, almost like a prayer focus. It just seems to kind of arise from that place, and nobody really gets left out.

There’s typically four areas where we talk about rites of passage in human development: birth, and then from adolescence into adulthood, and then marriage is typically one, and then death.  And those are all, I mean, you just think about how we celebrate, what we celebrate, apart from holidays—when does your family get together? Well, do they get together on your birthday? Do they get together when there is a funeral? Do they get together when there’s a wedding? Do they get together when there’s a baby born? So we still recognize those as kind of pivotal turning points. There’s a book that was published 12 years ago called the Circle of Life. It’s a picture book. Kind of predates those, you know, “A Day in America” books, and things like that. Circle of Life. It’s a multicultural approach to those four rites of passage, and there is some good text in there too. But I have a copy of the book, and it’s one of the first things that I got when I started looking at rites of passages. It’s visual; it’s not a scholarly book. It’s one way of getting an overview. I haven’t found an appropriate way to celebrate being a 43-year-old who knows that there’s more to life but doesn’t know how to live. Does that make sense?

In a sense, it’s the mid-life crisis passage. But there’s a book by Daniel Levinson (1985) called Seasons of a Man’s Life. And he found a pivot on almost every decade. Two years before or after each decade he found a real expression of this hunger, where, you know, big questions were coming out. So it was happening around 20s, happening around 30s, happening around 40s, happening around 50s, you know what I’m saying? And so those decade birthdays were kind of the markers. I’m not saying he threw out the whole idea of the midlife crisis, but he kind of put it in a broader context.

And that’s what I find taking these men out. I don’t really know how to contextualize those sorts of questions; I don’t know how to symbolize it. Maybe we can pray about that sometime. If you can articulate, which sometimes kids can and sometimes they can’t, and sometimes adults can’t either, but typically, by the time we leave, the men are able to articulate the joys and the hurts that have gone on in their lives and things that have left them wondering why, that have left them hungry for more. And right now, maybe something will come out of that. John Eldridge – I went to one of his men’s retreats. It was really good. I mean, nobody gets naked— I was just sure that they we were going to have an Indian sauna or something where everybody gets naked.  But it was nothing like that. There’s probably a way to bless mid-life joys and hurts through ritual, but I’m not sure exactly how— so we just, we bless it through friendships is what we try to do, if that makes sense.

There seems to be more there for adolescents, maybe because it’s harder for them to find that meaning or express things of their lives explicitly. But they will find that rite of passage, they will find meaning, they will find significance, they will find competence—these adolescents will— and they’ll find it by impregnating somebody or getting pregnant. They’ll find it in a gang, or they’ll find it through some sort of criminal behavior where they get recognized as an adult, you know? They’re going to find it, and so why don’t we just offer it to them? {laughing} Why don’t we just give it to them freely, as a positive?

When we do rites of passage, we’re focused on the call to responsible adulthood. And these kids know what we’re talking about. They’ve seen irresponsible adults. And we can talk about it— or they can talk about it better then we can— but we call it a move up to responsible adulthood, as opposed to obviously irresponsible adulthood. And we spent that whole week just talking about it. In my DMin dissertation, one of the appendices is the curriculum we use. It talks about relationships, it talks about lots of different things: sexuality, work, fulfillment, vocation, things like that. A lot of things that equal “responsible adulthood,” depending on how that gets expressed. A lot of ways get expressed in North America, and this gives them opportunity to ask about them, it’s extra-parental advice. At one time, it puts these adults around them that are cheering them on, and that believe in them, and have some reason to believe in them. It’s not just pie in the sky kind of stuff. But then it puts the monkey on their backs…  “Are you going to do this?” And typically they respond, “Yes.”

Looking back, what are the big surprises?

There’s a few things. The big surprise is that these kids—we’re the ones who are holding them back. And I watch them rise to the occasion, time and time again. This one time, it was just really embarrassing. This lady, one of the lady adult trip leaders, fell backwards into the creek.  So she’s just like this, strapped to her backpack in the water. She’s not in a life-threatening situation, and she’s apparently not injured, the water’s not covering her face or anything, but she’s embarrassed to death. The kids were just running with their feet, no Gore-Tex boots or anything, and picked her up and didn’t laugh at her, didn’t make fun of her. The adults were more prone to do that than the kids. So I’ve watched these kids rise to the occasion time and time again and then, they’re back home and through peer groups, whatever, I’ve watched them go and leave their adulthood in the wilderness—they left their adulthood there. And so that’s really happy and then frustrating, a happy-frustrating thing. But I’ve seen them be adults that would blow most adults away. And I’ve seen it with my own eyes. And I’ve been on the living end of it, you know? If you give them a chance, if you just think you might have an opportunity to go to the wilderness, they’ll just go to town on this. I want them to be as adult back home as much as in the wilderness.

The adults are after something different.  The adults have buried their hungers—they’ve buried their desires. They have low grade back pain, because —that’s a stupid thing to say but I think it’s stuck in their backs, or something— I don’t know, I’m not trying to be hyper-spiritual or anything, I’m not. But they sit at that desk all day, and I’m not saying they should be in the wilderness 365 days a year. That’s not what I mean, but I’m saying that whatever the wilderness kind of reawakens in them, they are just as quick to give it some Novocain as soon as they can get out of there, or die trying. And so, they need that time away. That time away is a refreshment to them, and sometimes the rigors of the trail kind of work against that, sometimes just because our physical bodies are used to complacency. And sometimes we survive on medications too.   This one lady fell backwards into the stream; another time she fell forward on the trail, she never smiled so much in her life than when she was backpacking with us. She was where she needed to be. She had the time of her life. Her husband was there; he thought he was dying of a heart attack. Well, he just had anxiety, that’s all. He was just wondering if he might not be able to make it. Literally, he took me aside, and said, “I think I’m having a heart attack,” and I said, “You’re fine, you’re fine. What you need to do is calm down and realize that you’re okay.” And I was just praying that he would be, but he really was, he was fine. He was just anxious. And his getting away was terrifying. The people who really need to get away are the adults. It’s advantageous for the youth to separate from their culture; it’s necessary for the adults. It moved beyond advantageous to seemingly life or death .

Back to the kids, I found this in my research. I kind of had this suspicion in the back of my mind: there’s a time in a kid’s life when they need the adults, their parents, and there is a time when they need a non-parental adult. And the research showed me that those kids who did not have their parents backpacking with them tended to grow more spiritually and recognize that than those who had a parent with them. And they always find mentors during the trip, and those mentoring relationships, we’ve watched them kind of percolate and grow. It wasn’t a willy-nilly kind-of-thing; it was based on real life. But if their parent was there, that was their mentor, and they weren’t knocked for it—it wasn’t like they were crippled or anything, that’s not what I’m saying, but we saw greater evidence of growth in those who had mentors other than their parents.  I’m a parent, so I have to watch what I say here. I’m not saying parents shouldn’t go or anything like that. And we’ve read about it now from the Search Institute. They describe 40 assets, one of which is exposure to non-parental adults. I saw that and said, “Wow, it’s the truth.”

Particularly for adolescents, that’s what I’m talking about— adolescents need to be exposed to a number of non-parental adults. And then they need exposure, and then they need to have the freedom to develop those relationships with a non-parental adult, healthy, yes, obviously, but relationships that we used to call apprentice relationships. The silversmith has an apprentice, or a farrier, or a seamstress has an apprentice working for her, whatever. And we don’t have that anymore. We’ve moved beyond this merchant class society, but just to recognize and to celebrate that. And there’s no better place to do that than the church. I mean, I’m just convinced of that.  There is no better place to celebrate and to love on that, than in the church. It’s freed me. I mean, since getting a sense of that, my wife and I have both intentionally developed relationships with teenagers who live around us because we see so much in them.

So, it’s kind of freed me up to invest more in these kids. I just see the value of community. You can talk about it a million different ways, but to recognize the value of a worshiping community that finds its expression in more places than just the Sunday morning worship, or even more than just a Sunday school class (though I value Sunday school and the relationships that are formed there, cross-generational relationships). But those things have to be almost serendipitous, you know, they almost have to grow on the vine, and you know that this relationship is developing when it’s already bloomed and blossoms are coming out. And so now, that’s just kind of what I do there, and I encourage other adults to do the same and encourage them all the time. And I encourage parents to let other adults into their kid’s lives. It’s healthy, but I found out not because I read it in the Search Institute, but I found it out because it was going on in these kids’ lives. And, the kids in that particular research piece, they were good kids. That was 10 years ago that I did the research, and I’ve seen all of them, some of them within the last week, and all of them within the last year or two. And I’m not saying there isn’t anything negative about it, I’m just saying there’s some other positive ways out here, and so somehow parents have got to go beyond recognizing it, to blessing it and encouraging it.

Just sitting kids down and preaching to them doesn’t work. I’m a Campus Crusade for Christ graduate, and so I’ve done that a lot. There are times when it’s appropriate; there are times when it wasn’t disaster {chuckles}, but that’s not what anybody needs. And the other thing that hasn’t worked, I have tried some trips where I’ve just gone completely non-curricular, ‘oh, the wilderness will be our curriculum,’ or whatever. Some people apparently can pull that off— maybe I need to go with them, to learn from them—but I’m a little bit too anal for that, and so if I try to do that, I can’t. Maybe it’s just my need to see what’s happening. But I think if there’s some spiritual growth going on, I think it’s okay to really look at that, so that you can point a finger at it. Even if it’s conceptual or abstract, I think you can. But anyway, I tried that. I tried going too status quo, just set ‘em down and preach to ‘em, and I tried flying by the seat of my pants, following the wilderness experience. And those are two big debates in the camping movement, in the Christian camping movement still today. There are some people who really completely reject the talk-back small group reflection model, who completely reject it. And there are other people who see that it changes lives. Well anyway, that just never did work, neither of those things worked for me.

And when I’m dealing with adolescents, it works better to take my friends in my church that I’m pastor of, to take these kids that I knew. It worked better for me to have a relationship with them.  And those relationships grow and are fostered in the wilderness. It doesn’t seem to be quite as critical for me working with adults, but it was better for me, and I think for the kids in that situation. And I was pleasantly surprised by that.

What is your advice to someone wanting to start something like this?

My advice would be to focus on the relationships, to absolutely give it a shot. You know, to learn some, maybe to go on some trips with some other people, learn some skills, there’s a certain base body of knowledge that you need and decision-making capabilities that you need to possess. And I don’t put much store in that, but maybe go work some trips for somebody else who’s more experienced backpacking, whether it’s with some adults or whatever, just get your feet wet. But then, my advice would be to go for it, to believe in those kids, and to give it a shot. Just surrender that to the Lord, you know? There are lots of things I’ve wanted to do as a pastor, and it didn’t happen, it didn’t work. But somehow to surrender that to the Lord, and say, “okay, if we’re going to do this, let’s do it the way you want me to” —what does that mean? Well, sometimes that will take you down different roads, and then the way this guy over here does it, or to do it how I learned in seminary, or whatever, or doing it the way I think it ought to be done.

And to believe in those kids. I’ve told some pastors this, I mean, I’ve had pastors talk to me, and I’m just sort of the guy in the area that has done this more than most. But I always say to put the emphasis on ministry, not on backpacking. I don’t care if any of them can come back able to tie this particular knot, or if they set up their tents well, or whatever. The emphasis has to be on ministry. And that ministry is, it’s a lot different than what we’re used to.  Well, different than what I was used to, I guess, so to be open to that. That’s where you reach the kids.

Is there anything you’d change if you could do over again?  Anything you’d do different?

You know, I talked about respecting the kids, and believing in them. I came on that slowly, to be honest with you. I had a trip that just ended in disaster, and lots of dynamics were going on, but we ended up leaving the wilderness early. We had other adults there, this couple and myself. No one of us was in charge, we were in it together. And so they had decided, and I got outvoted.  And I’m okay, you know, I’m at peace with that, that was a long time ago. But anyway, I wish that I would’ve believed in the kids earlier, and I wish I would have given a more organic, emerging type of trip that trusted them more and put more store in who they were and what their needs were, rather than an imposition of guidelines from the outside. And so, that’s the second thing, the imposition of these guidelines. That’s who I am—that’s more about how I grew up, who I am, and how I did things. And so this other more organic and emerging model is much more relational and much more beautiful, and I think that’s the direction we’re moving in, the direction I’ve been moving for 20 years. This trip I’m referring to that was a disaster, I literally wept. I wept. I mean, I wept for days. I wept, in the wilderness of Colorado I wept, before we even left I wept. The kids were saying, “What’s the matter, Steve?” And this is what was the matter, the dichotomy. I’m going to draw the dichotomy too strongly, but I’m going to use that to make my point. During that trip, I had to be their parent and not their mentor.

And Robert Bly says that the parent corrects and a mentor blesses. And I had to be, and the other adults with me, we put ourselves in the position— and we’ve corrected it now to the best of our abilities through different pre-trip and other simple things. But we put ourselves into the position of being parents, and setting down the rules, and this is how it’s going to be done, these are the guidelines rather than blessing them for who they are and trusting them to the extent possible. And so, I wept that trip because it was worth weeping about. And I couldn’t even say it then. I can say it now, but then I didn’t even know why I was crying. I wish I knew that; I wish I could have known better then.

What about themes of God’s creation?

I’ll admit that I haven’t put that on the front burner on any of the things I’ve tried to bring to the trip. And in west Texas, culturally we’re a little bit behind on trying to catch up on some of that, you know? There’s a lot of North America that’s a lot farther ahead of us, than we are typically in our little subculture in western Texas. But it’s typically something that the kids talk about, and it’s definitely something that they express. And especially those who have a Christian faith.

As I read the scriptures, I wonder if creation is an evangelistic tool. Tool is maybe not the right word, but an evangelistic opportunity that hasn’t been explored, at least in my experience hasn’t been explored very clearly.

You mean environmental theology?

Yeah, yeah, Paul says in Romans that God and his invisible qualities and the divine nature are made known through his creation. So, if we got enough exposure to things that were green instead of concrete, or you know, rain in our face instead of air conditioning, I just wonder if we wouldn’t kind of stumble into God and just need very little prompting to bring that to the surface.

You know, Paul talks about it in Acts 17. He said, “You know God – you’ve known him all along. He’s given you rain in the right seasons, and your crops have been abundant. All I’m telling you is that he’s come and revealed himself even more clearly than through your crops and your rain, and he’s made today the day to say yes to his son Jesus. Or Romans 8, “All creation is groaning in eager expectation, waiting for the release of the bondage of decay, and waiting for the fruition of this life.” Okay, I’m being saved, I’m working out my salvation with fear and trembling, but so is mother earth to some extent, you know? And so, I’ll have to admit that that’s a narrow end of my trips and something that I really don’t, that I’m really not sure what to do with at times. And sometimes environmentalists are still kind of, and this isn’t any excuse, but it’s the culture I’m living in, we still think, we don’t take environmentalists seriously. And Christian environmentalists especially, you know? So I can’t say that much about it from my experience, or from what we’ve done on the trips. I can just point to a small opening in my own eyes.

What do you most hope participants take away from the trips?

I want, just the sense of community that is empowered with God. You know, it’s not just, okay, we’re buddies, or anything like that. I value that, I value friendship. I value friendship more than most people value that, but, friendship with power, friendship with the holy spirit. Romans 1:11 talks about longing to impart to you some spiritual gift, or probably some gift from the spirit, it’s hard to interpret. But I mean, it’s, pneumatakios charisma, spiritual gift. He says the spiritual, that is, that you and I might be encouraged, mutually encouraged, by each other’s faith. There’s some way, there’s some spiritual activity, there’s some spiritual component to our relationship, there’s some holy spirit component to our relationship. Okay, that’s what Paul’s talking about. So between Christians— he’s writing for the Christians in Rome, right? So between Christians, there’s the Holy Spirit, what the Holy Spirit does in those relationships. You know, I read that, and I was puzzled by it. I went to the commentaries, and finally I just set them aside, and I prayed on it. Finally, I said it this way in a sermon one time, I said, “The holy spirit in me is glad to see the holy spirit in you.”

Well, so that gets lived out into a higher order in the wilderness? And we can drop our guard a little bit while we’re out there, and we can be a little bit more real, a little bit more honest— whether it comes out in a tear, or whatever, or however it gets expressed—helping people out of the creek, carrying their gear over the pass, many different ways it gets expressed, but it’s real. I wish that we could live that way on the flatland. I live on the semi-arid plain; I live on the Llano Estacado, the largest tract of nearly level land in the western hemisphere. And I happen to live in a canyon, right off the Llano Estacado, or the “states plain” (that’s what that means), but I wish we could live that way here, like we can in the mountains, I really do.

So the added components are inside the wilderness, I think we have an increased openness to one another and an increased openness to what the Holy Spirit’s doing in our lives. But if the Holy Spirit’s really the Holy Spirit, in other words God himself, well then, he can give us that openness. He can awaken and arouse in us something. I mean, it’s obviously enhanced by the wilderness, but he can arouse that in us in the Business Center in Keystone Lodge in Colorado (where we are right now), you know? And that’s what I want. That’s what I want.

And I intentionally take my friends backpacking with me, even some of those who have never been backpacking before. I want to share with them the joy that I have out there, but I want them to come back and keep it, and share it there too.

I’m in an interesting place now, at the camp, where I’ve just been there two and a half years. And so in a sense, it’s just getting off the ground. But just the growth in that— we’re scheduling more trips, and enjoying more time in the wilderness with more people, and just in the last couple of years I’ve gotten back into the program at Asbury. I went through it as a student in the ’80s, and then in the late ’90s I did it, and now I’m back in it again, and so it’s almost a type of evangelism, I guess.  It’s spreading the good news of God’s creation, and that’s how I see myself. And the typically nine seminary students, for instance, that I took out this last summer, many of them are still doing things in the wilderness. They’re getting into it, God’s opening their eyes, and they’re seeing that as a place for ministry.  It’s not a tool, it’s not a resource, it’s ministry. And they recognize that.

Along with some of the men I backpack with in Texas… and, so, I see it as a type of evangelism.  Now they’re doing some things with other men or with other kids.  That’s what I like to see.  That’s what’s attracting and driving me. That’s what gives me hope.

Postscript

“My current position is Team Training Coordinator at Antioch Community Church in Waco, Texas. I lead relational-team training for our long- and short-term missionaries. Christian spirituality is as much about dealing with each other as it is about dealing with God, as someone once said. I also lead an annual backpacking trip for folks in our movement of churches – a time to get away, connect with one another and with Jesus.”