Teens After God
Session 1: June 30 - July 26 Session2: July 28 - Aug 24
A few years ago Camp Tecumseh was hiring its entire counseling staff from overseas. This provided a beneficial camping experience to many extremely capable individuals and our campers got to meet people from all over the world. Overall, it's a great deal. Meanwhile in our cities, here in New Jersey , our viable options for potential counselors were getting fewer and fewer. Our ministries to older teenagers and young adults were lacking. Without local counselors to act as role models to our kids who walked the same streets and who knew the same neighborhoods we would begin to lose our kids as they got older. The solution to this dilemma? More relationships and better Leadership Training.
It is a three step process. We've got to get young people to fall in love with Camp ministry. Then we've got to empower them to take ownership in the lives of the campers. Once this occurs we've got to teach them to be good leaders to those campers and to their peers.
This brought about our Junior Staff Training program, TAG. TEENS AFTER GOD is a program that we have put into place to show our younger staff that working at Camp Tecumseh is much more than a summer job. It's more than ten weeks of doing the dishes, mowing the grass, or cleaning the camp. It is an entire summer of moments where even the most menial of jobs will provide a chance to learn or to teach. A child who drops a tray of food is subject to humiliation in front of an entire cafeteria, until the 14 year old kitchen maintenance worker standing a few feet away drops a stack of trays as well. Or a child wanders away from his cabin on the way to the pool and winds up alone on the playground to be found by a waitress on her way to her room after lunch. These are ministry moments, in these few seconds a junior staff member can make a tremendous impact in the life of a camper. These are the moments that we can never plan on but we must encourage our staff to recognize and take advantage of.
You don't build great leaders by seeing them for a few short months every year. We get together with our TAG group between four and six times when camp is off-season. We aim to meet with them once a month as this program continues to grow. Sometimes we just have fun with them. Whether it is going snow tubing or going to a concert, there are times when we just need to get together. We've also had a weekend retreat at the camp where they don't have to work, it's just for them. This was filled with games and a movie, we carved pumpkins and roasted the seeds, our devotional time together was led by one of our young teenagers. We must play an active role in their lives. It is not a sacrifice of our time or resources, but an investment in the future of our camp. This is how we form relationships that last years.
This is not an optional program when you work at Camp Tecumseh . If you are junior staff, fourteen to sixteen years old, part of your job is to participate in TAG. It takes a commitment from day one until the end of the summer. You are paired up with a mentor from the Senior Staff, usually a returning staff member or one with some prior camp experience and usually in the area that you eventually want to work. If you want to be a lifeguard, you will be paired up with somebody from the aquatics staff. If you want to be a counselor you are paired up with another counselor. This establishes familiarity with the position, opens relational channels and prepares the staff member for things that are likely to happen once he or she assumes that position. This is the largest part of our leadership training segment.
Our approach, with its focus on the summer months and supplemental get-togethers throughout the year, brings a sense of continuity to the Camp experience. It almost guarantees us a reasonable number of returning staff and it builds up a Camp Tecumseh family. As we see our first TAG members getting to be old enough to be counselors, we see them recruiting younger brothers and sisters for us. We see them taking leadership roles in their corps and churches. We see them back every summer.
TAG works. It makes Camp Tecumseh a better place and it provides an experience for our staff and campers that will keep them coming back year after year after year.