Not Your Father's Church Camp

This blog has been away at camp: Church camp specifically. More about that part later.

The camp was located at Orange Beach, Alabama. It is part of the Obama/BP Uh-Oh Zone from the oil leak in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico.

Orange Beach is located east of Mobile, Alabama and west of Pensacola, Florida and I am happy to announce that I have seen a tar ball. It was really more like a tar blob. If you are a pelican, you ain’t getting this stuff off. I can report it looks like uncooled fudge that your (or any other mother) would make. I can also report that it is …..oil. Back to you, Walter.

As many of you may know, I am one of those awful Evangelical Christians and as such, go to Evangelical Christian things like church. You may remember church, it is open every Sunday.

In case you haven’t been paying attention in the last twenty years, church is a little bit different than what you may remember. Mainly, it is louder.

There is something church people call, “the blended service”, which the, um, older saints attend. In “the blended service” the congregation sings these odd songs called “hymns” from a “hymnal”. The congregation sits and stands and then listens to a sermon from a man wearing a tie.

However, a lot of Evangelicals attend a “contemporary service” which has more guitars, and drums, and everybody stands for a good forty minutes. The preacher doesn’t wear a tie and usually doesn’t tuck his shirt tail in.

My mother spent a good portion of my formative years making sure my shirt tail was tucked in at church. Now, apparently, the Lord doesn’t care about that as much as he did in 1967.

The camp was not a camp in the “traditional” sense of camp either. For one thing, everyone slept at a condominium and not in a cabin and the food was a whole lot better than what I remember camp food being.

The camp service singing was led by Charlie Hall. Mr. Hall, even by today’s standard is unique looking. He has a goatee that stretches down to mid-sternum which he ties with a bead. He is bald headed and has a tattoo. Back in my camp going days, we would seriously wonder if such person was human, much less Christian. Yet he sang these very Christian songs in a Bono-esque type voice backed by a tight band.

The camp pastor was Dr. David Platt, who is a young man. I have ties older than David Platt. Platt is a very intelligent passionate preacher that has an earned doctorate and to top it off, seems like a great kid. It doesn’t hurt that he is a graduate of The University of Georgia. Just saying.

Despite being a history major, I’m not one of those guys that lives in the past. I learned long ago, that sometimes the present is better than the past and that the future can be better than the present.

I can say that about the kids we took down to Orange Beach. They will make the future better than the present. These kids listened to the sermons and took notes.

Honestly, kids now days.