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Dear Folks:
The Outdoor Ministries Committee has voted unanimously to cease programming and promoting summer camps after this season. This includes the Great Escape Adult Adventures, which will have its last session August 24 - 29, 2025 @ Christikon; registration is open until August 15.
We are committed to financially supporting young campers who attend the UCC Camps Placerville (SD) and N-Sid-Sen (ID) and the Lutheran Christikon. Scholarships are available for any mainline church camp that our kids want to go to. We made this change because it has been increasingly difficult to staff our own camps; after last year’s season, all the volunteers needed to step away from leadership. Not having leaders forced us to reevaluate our ability to mount outdoor ministry programs, and we cancelled You and Me Camp due to low registration numbers.
The final programming event of the season is the Great Escape, which has also seen a decline in numbers of leaders and attendees. As the committee developed the program for this final week of the season, we named that the work of the four faithful members on Outdoor Ministries was proving less rewarding and increasingly difficult, so we made the decision, with sighs of sadness, to stop programming and promoting our own camps.
We sense the Holy Spirit calling us as a committee--and more fully as a Conference--to rest and recuperate, and then to recalibrate, retool, and redesign ministry that connects us to God’s creation. Following a fallow year, we will gather to discern whether to build on what we’ve done or create something new. Part of that determination will be based on our capability to engage new people in the work. Would you like to be part of the team that, with God’s help, cocreates what comes next?
Outdoor Ministries was all-consuming of the Conference’s finances, time and energy. Now we are noticing that congregational and clergy support needs some shoring up. At the leadership retreat in May we discerned 3 focuses for our work together:
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