thoughts on camping traditions in Community of Christ

This summer, I attended a Community of Christ “Reunion” camp for the third time. All three times have been at a campground in Southern Indiana owned by my local “mission center” (a regional grouping of congregations, not dissimilar to an LDS stake or a Catholic dioceses). I’ve wanted to write this post since getting back from Reunion in mid-June, and it probably would have been a better post if I had written it right away. That said, we’ve been doing a lot of family travel since then, and I’ve been trying to process exactly what I want to write about Reunion, so it’s only happening now.

Attending Reunion for the first time, back in 2022, felt like it was a major step forward in my membership in Community of Christ. Camping is a big deal in this tradition, and attending a church camp was important to me for getting to better know my new spiritual home. To illustrate the importance of Reunions, I’d like to refer to the excellent book Restorations: Scholars in Dialogue from Community of Christ and The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (which I’ve written about before). One of the later chapters in the book compares and contrasts sacred space in the two denominations. Reading the chapter, it feels like it was originally intended to focus on comparing and contrasting temple theology, but that it eventually took another direction. In fact, Katherine Hill, who writes the Community of Christ part of the chapter, spends a few pages writing about Reunion campgrounds before she even gets to the Independence Temple.

I can feel that sense of sacred space when I attend the Glenn Wood Hills campground where my mission center’s Reunion takes place. There are people there for whom camp is just as sacred as church—people there whom I’ve seen three years in a row at camp but whom I might never see in a church building. There are families that travel from Chicago, Iowa, and North Carolina to be at their campground. There are campfire songs that are as sacred to attendees as any hymn in the hymnbook, camping traditions that are as holy as any church sacrament. When I talk with other people at Reunion, I am awed by the sacredness of this place for them. It’s no surprise that Hill began her chapter writing about campgrounds instead of temples.

The sacredness of this space also leads to a deep sense of community when at Reunion. There were four generations of at least one family at this year’s camp, and three generations of other families present as well. Many of these people grew up with each other and have years of stories to share. If I set off across the campgrounds to see where my kid is at a particular moment, there’s a good chance that someone will stop me to tell me that I don’t need to worry so much—at Reunion, everyone keeps an eye out for each other’s kids, and the safety net extends to every adult. People take care of each other at Reunion.

This year, since the Reunion theme was focused on taking care of our planet, and since I read part of Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass on the way to camp, it stood out to me how nice it was to spend time in a place with a weak cell signal and just among nature. I grew up in Scouting, but I am way out of practice with spending time away from scholarship and suburbia and appreciating the world around me. Reunion is a place where I can practice abandoning the false god of control by letting myself (and my kid) get dirty, sweaty, and bug-bitten instead of craving the insulated, sterile environment that I tend to prefer.

I write all of that to lead up to a confession, though: I was really anxious at Reunion this year. Reunion is typically a week long, but I’ve only ever been able to attend for a few days. In previous years, this has been due to car logistics. Those logistics were less demanding this year, so I thought that kiddo and I might be able to attend for the whole week, but a family wedding meant that we once again only attended for the first weekend of camp. Even then, I spent a lot of the time eager to go back home, and part of me has been thinking about whether I even want to go back next year.

It’s not that I don’t recognize the sacred space that Reunion is, the community that’s present there, or the benefits of being out in nature. It’s that this isn’t the sacred space that I grew up with, that I don’t have the deep community connections that other attendees have, and that kiddo and I visited the nurse four different times on Saturday to remove four separate ticks. I was far outside my comfort zone over that weekend, and it nearly pushed me to my breaking point. I want to be a part of this grand Community of Christ tradition, but I don’t want to do it at the expense of my often-tenuous mental health.

When I first started to mentally draft this post in the days after Reunion, I was planning to leave things at a more ambiguous point. Having a few weeks to think about things—to write about abandoning the false god of control and to visit some of the friends kiddo and I made at Reunion—has made me more optimistic. Don’t get me wrong: This was a rough year, and I’m not interested in doing church things out of any sense of obligation towards my church. If I don’t feel like Reunion 2025 is going to be healthy for my anxiety, I’m not going to go—or at least, I’m not going to have any qualms about only showing up for a couple of days instead of “finally” going for a whole week. That said, kiddo loves church camp, I really like the people that I meet there, and maybe I could do better with a bit more sleep, bringing some anxiety chews to camp, and just doing some more prep work before I go.

I guess that still is ambiguous, and that’s really why I wanted to write the post after all. I love parts of Reunion, and there are other parts that push me to my limits. I don’t know what to make of all that, but I’m glad that I have until next April or May before I need to decide again.

• macro
• Communities
• Reunion
• Community of Christ
• Restorations
• anxiety
• Independence temple
• Braiding Sweetgrass
• Robin Wall Kimmerer