From the Camp Director,

WOW!!! That went fast. 12 weeks of camp. Just like that comes to an end. I was very excited to see how many campers we had this summer. We continue to grow each summer. I'm happy to see the amount from our supporting churches continues to rise. I would love to see even more from our own churches though. The potential is a lot more than we have been getting. I know CIY, Mission Trips, 4H and vacations are always going to compete for summer camp. But, we still have more potential from our own churches than we are getting. 

I want to thank all of our Event Coordinators & Faculty, we had more volunteers this summer than we have had in the past few years! Praise the Lord! I want to thank our Summer Staff. These kids work so hard behind the scenes to make sure every week we have clean buildings, food is prepared and cooked, recreation is facilitated, buildings get repaired and grass is cut.  We had a really good team that focused on offering hospitality without grumbling this summer.(1 Peter 4:9) 

I want to thank our program Intern, Caitlin Smith. She worked tirelessly all summer with Event Coordinators & Summer Staff to insure we had everything in place and ready for camp and making sure recreation schedules were developed for every camp session. We are so excited to be keeping Caitlin as a year-round staff person that will be transitioning into our Program Director.

As the camp continues to grow we defiantly need a another staff person to help with programming and recreation.  Caitlin graduated this Spring from Johnson University and will be getting married to Brett Baer this September. Brett also served the camp as our Multi-Media Intern and led our summer staff band this summer. They are going to be a great addition to our camp. Keep them in your prayers as they transition to the camp life year-round. 

Thanks to all of our supporting churches and individual partners for helping us make this summer a great summer for those that attended camp.

Gary Baker, Executive Director

garybaker@hangingrock.org

From the Program Intern, 

Hey y’all!

I had the amazing opportunity to be the Program  Intern this summer working alongside Event Coordinators to help plan their weeks of camp.

There were many fun exciting events that we planned for campers from a foam party for 5th & 6th graders to a mud pit for our JH kids. There were several campers’ lives changed this summer as we had several baptisms happen. God worked a lot this summer from changing hearts during worship to conversations had with counselors. A cool highlight to mention is that all of our main camps had well over 100 kids in attendance this year. Wilderness camps grew larger this year as well. All 3 horse camps were maxed out and 2 paintball camps were maxed out. We also maxed out our Joy Camp.  With our program staff we had 13 college kids spend their summer here at camp serving their time to facilitate recreational activities, being dorm RA’s and cleaning our facilities some of them even transitioned to faculty when asked.  We are so thankful for our summer staff that spend their summer with us because we know without them camp would not happen.

Summer 2023 was a huge success with God changing campers lives and blessing us with the hands to make camp happen.

-Program Intern, Caitlin Smith

We want to invite everyone to come out and enjoy some fish and support us as we raise money for the flooring projects. If you have been in the gym lately you will see how bad we need new flooring. We will be putting carpet squares in the gym and classrooms. One classroom will have plank flooring for crafts (Mainly glitter, ladies.) Then we are adding plank flooring in the walkway from the dining room to the gym for overflow dining space. We are still working out the details for the flooring in the dining hall. We have raised $26,302.00 We are needing $36,000 for the gym and classrooms. The quote for the dining hall is still a work in progress. 

From the Associate Director, 

Well, my third summer overseeing food service has almost come to an end! We are finishing the summer with a group of about 150 which may seem like a lot, but it is on the smaller side of numbers for a week this summer. Most weeks we had 200-250 people on property at any given time.You can imagine what that looked like concerning food service. Cooking three meals a day for 200+ people day in and day out sure takes a lot of work to accomplish it. I could not have done any of this without the help of my kitchen staff!

A huge shout of thanks goes out to Vera for holding down the breakfast shift, so I didn’t have to get up so early. Mary Jane (MJ) for doing dinner shift, so I could go home from time to time this summer. Sarah and Neema for being amazing kitchen assistants and willing to help in all areas of the kitchen. Emily, Tatiyana, Darby, Grace, and Kortni for doing countless dishes this summer. All these ladies served with a smile, and a heart of gold. The kitchen and dish room are some of the hottest and most stressful areas at camp and these ladies handled everything that was thrown at them.

Throughout the summer we also had several volunteers help with meals. It is a huge blessing when we have people volunteer their time and talents to help serve. So, a huge shout of thanks goes out to the volunteers as well! Thank you for sacrificing your time and helping prepare meals for the campers and faculty.

I am still crunching the numbers of how many total meals we served this summer, and will have those by the September edition, but I do know that it is well over 25,000 meals served this summer!

We had our challenges this summer for sure, but in the end, we were able to serve all the campers, faculty, and staff a delicious meal.

Gary and I always tell our staff that we want to eliminate distractions for people when they are here at camp. One way we do that is by having hot, delicious meals ready to go for them three times a day. Campers do not have to worry where their next meal is coming from, and it is due to the hard work of the kitchen staff.

So, thanks again to all these ladies and volunteers who made that happen. Let’s start prepping for summer 2024!

We also want to thank all those that donated items for the kitchen this year. We made it through the summer without having to pay for any cereal.

Todd Blair, Associate Director

toddblair@hangingrock.org