Kids attending Christian summer camps often say the best part of their experience is their counsellors. Photo by Greg Westfall (Flickr CC).

Summer camp super heroes

Campers look up to counsellors for love and leadership

This story originally appeared in the Focus on Camps feature in the April print edition of ChristianWeek. View it here.

Even when surrounded by exciting activities, games and equipment, kids attending Christian summer camps often say the best part of their experience is the staff. It’s not hard to understand why when many counsellors, or cabin leaders, are so dedicated to the campers and take such joy in serving.

When asked why they choose to give up their summers to serve at camp, cabin leaders are quick to point out that they are not giving up their time, because there is nothing else they would rather be doing.

“Being a camp counsellor is exhausting and stressful at times,” says Nicole Syptak, director of horsemanship at Arden Circle Square Ranch in Ontario, “but the summers I have spent at camp have been the best summers of my life.”

Syptak enjoys mentoring the campers, giving the kids someone to look up to. “I have my flaws and things I still need to work on,” she says, “but when I’m working with kids, I strive even harder to be the best version of myself.”

Leah Shadbolt, a counsellor at Harbour Ridge Camp (Wesley Acres), near Bloomfield, Ontario, says that the sleepless nights and early mornings are worth it so that she can share the love of Christ with kids.

Shadbolt remembers replacing a planned evening devotion with a testimony night in her cabin. “We were up until the wee hours of the morning, sharing our lives, being vulnerable and just loving each other. It was a powerful night.”

Many cabin leaders remember looking up to counsellors when they attended camp as kids.

“I remember as a camper, it was just fun to have an older teenager who wanted to spend time with us as campers." Photo courtesy Circle Square Ranch.
“I remember as a camper, it was just fun to have an older teenager who wanted to spend time with us as campers." Photo courtesy Circle Square Ranch.

“I remember as a camper, it was just fun to have an older teenager who wanted to spend time with us as campers,” Shadbolt says. “The counsellors were the coolest people around, and I don’t think this has changed much.”

“I also work at camp because I love the way you are able to surround kids with God’s truth, in nature and in the Bible,” says Ryan O’Byrne, a cabin leader at Mill Stream Bible Camp, located in South Central Ontario. “They soak it up and remember it long after camp is over.”

O’Byrne says both staff and campers often wear “masks” when they arrive at camp, but gradually, through laugh, play, and deep discussion, the masks “slip away and campers share with you the parts of themselves they normally keep so carefully hidden: their worries, their burdens, their hurts, their weaknesses. In that meaningful moment, you often get to say, ‘me too,’ because a lot of the burdens we carry are similar.”

And, of course, camp is fun. “When in your life do you get to sing about a “great big moose who liked to drink a lot of juice” or run your heart out to amass and defend rubber chickens?” O’Byrne says. “There are so many benefits to working at camp that, to me, it would feel like more of a sacrifice to have to not work at camp.”

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