What a tremendous Spring Work Day for 2013! Volunteers from all over the surrounding area, including summer campers, locals from Oswego County, folks from nearby churches in greater Syracuse area, to Chittenango, Rome, and Utica came out to our retreat center and helped us get our facility ready for summer camp 2013!.

There are so many exciting projects currently underway at camp, from our unstructured play area, to the community garden, to the installation of new docks — and none of it would be possible without the help of our incredible volunteers!

This past weekend, volunteers were able to organize the summer program closet, do painting in Robert Lodge, a ton of yard cleanup, put together the playground equipment for our unstructured play area, dissemble the old docks in preparation for the new ones being installed before summer camp, clean up thousands of pounds of downed trees and convert them to firewood, re-install the fencing and irrigation for the garden this summer, and even start getting some plants in the ground!

And even more exciting, they got the site looking fantastic for our summer camp open house which we held the very next day! Summer camp 2013 registrations are on pace to break the record we set last year, but none of this would be remotely possible without all of those who give so freely of their time and energy to make it happen.

And to those who have been working hard to help us, check back on our website or Facebook page in the next week or so as we make several more exciting announcements!

While summer camp is filling up fast, room is still available! anyone interested in signing up should do so now, we don’t want to miss out on seeing anyone at camp this summer! More pictures available below.

We took our first short term experience in mission in 2012, and we took 7 youth and 5 adults to Schoharie to help with some much needed flood relief.

Fast forward to 2013, and 15 youth from many different churches of several denominational backgrounds joined our team of 5 adults to head back to Schoharie to continue to ongoing relief effort there. Disasters come and go every year, and the onslaught of one seems to relegate the previous to the dust bin of forgotten news cycles. Unfortunately for those who are the victims of a given disaster, the damage caused very much remains even after FEMA and the television crews have gone.

This is why Vanderkamp has teamed up with the King of Kings Lutheran Church in Liverpool to offer our Short Term experiences in mission. A chance not just for youth to enjoy Vanderkamp outside of the summer camp season, but a chance for us to lend a hand to our neighbors in Schoharie county who are still suffering from the untold damage from Hurricane Irene and Tropical Storm Lee.

In 2013 our team worked with Americorps volunteers, on site local folks willing to chip in, and Lutheran Disaster Response to chip in on a number of different projects that I’ll detail shortly. But the most inspiring thing about this trip was how our young people worked. Having worked with thousands of volunteers in my lifetime, I can say that volunteer efforts can be a fairly mixed bag. Some groups will work their fingers to the bone, while others might spend more time in the shade than with a shovel. This group worked so hard that each job given them was accomplished in half the time that had been allotted. They worked tirelessly and without complaint, and made an incredible difference in each piece of work they did.

Volunteering in large scale relief efforts can sometimes feel dissatisfying. Rarely does one get to start a project and see it through to completion. Most of the people one helps are out of town, so “thanks” are few and far between. There is a lot of debris clean up, mucking things out, and other less than glamorous jobs. But this group did everything asked of them, and more. They understood fully that their role would be to come in and do some small piece of work so that no one else would ever have to. They embraced the idea that each piece of debris removed, or each wall painted, would never have to be painted again. They relished the opportunity to give back and inspired the adult leaders who brought them.

We left sore, happy, chagrined that we couldn’t do more, and grateful to have played our small part. On to the various projects our kids helped out with, and some accompanying pictures.

This list could never be exhaustive of all the kids did, but here’s a try!

They:

Primed the interior of a major downtown business storefront.
Tore down an old shed that was unsafe with rot.
Removed countless bags of debris and garbage from sites that had been cleaned by other volunteers.
Helped to gut a house that the owner is still considering rebuilding.
Emptied out, swept, mopped, and refilled a museum in Blenheim, NY, that had been filled with water during the flooding.
Emptied a barn of thousands and thousands of pounds of lumber so that it could be moved back onto its foundation.
Removed an old boat that had washed ashore.

And so much more.

In our two years of work, our volunteers have put in over 400 hours of work. 400 hours no one will have to repeat. And we’ll be going back this Fall, and again next Spring. There’s still a lot of work to do out in Schoharie, so contact SALT, the organization that is assisting in the long term recovery of Schoharie County until the last house is repainted and the last piece of debris is removed.

Vanderkamp Center is a Christian Summer Camp and Retreat Center near Syracuse, NY. When the summer campers aren’t busy changing the world and helping with disaster relief, they are learning to love themselves in an environment that we consider to be the safest from teasing and bullying in the world. Check out our facilities and our summer camp page for more info.

Children today have so much of their lives structured for them, whether it’s their 7:30am-3pm daily school regimen, or preparing for standardized testing and doing homework in their free time, or piling up community service for college applications, or playing organized sports and taking ballet lessons, studies have shown that kids in America today play FAR less than they have at any point in human history. While adults have sculpted children’s lives with the best possible intentions, studies are finding that it’s actually having dire consequences for our children at large.

Children who have their lives pre-programmed wind up lacking many of the absolutely critical life skills that are developed organically while interacting with peers in a safe and open-ended environment. Based on the research of the Partnership for 21st Century Skills, people are waking up to how important play actually was in the child’s regimen all along. Businesses are finding that many fresh-out-of-college job applicants lack what the Pf21CS calls the “Learning and Innovation Skills” – Critical thinking, communication, collaboration, and creativity.

Our response as a society, unfortunately, has been to try and cram these skills into our structured curricula, whereas if we turned to history, the answer was actually in what adults weren’t doing, as opposed to what they were.

Throughout human history, children have needed the “Learning and Innovation” skills to thrive in their play groups. Creativity is needed to figure out how to have fun in the woods, communication is needed to get others on board with one’s idea, collaboration is necessary (and fun) when trying to build a fort or play a freshly created game, and critical thinking is constantly employed when engaging in new activities each day. Unfortunately, many of these skills simply aren’t employed when one goes from activity to activity that one’s parents or teachers has chosen – and especially not when those activities have prescribed rules, expectation, and equipment.

We’ve realized that, at Vanderkamp, we are pre-programming children’s lives more than we want to be, or ought to be. We pride ourselves on offering as much choice as possible, but when kids were choosing largely from various structured activities, were we doing our best?

We turned to the kids for answers. We asked child after child from summer camp for their most memorable times at camp, and almost to a child they pointed to something seemingly unexpected that happened. We had one week where the kids ran with one of our “Outrageous Activity” ideas – that we’d pretend to be aliens colonizing an area of the forest. That’s the picture of the colony, on the right. You can see the aliens having a meeting in the background, and the fortress on the right. General Zod and one of his companions is seen in the foreground.

They came up with names for themselves and wove an elaborate plot of politics, conflict, and ultimately collaboration. We were right along side them the whole time, loving it every bit as much as they were. It was such a success, that it was actually the inspiration for our Dream World Week that we’re running this year. And as we brainstormed what else we could do, we realized that something was missing:

An intentional space where imaginations could soar.

So we began doing some research. Taylor pointed our group in the direction of the research of Simon Nicholson, whose “Loose Parts” theory has informed unstructured play areas throughout the world. We agreed, an area with lots of things non-fixed items would be amazing. We had our first ingredient: loose parts. Blocks, crates, tubes, water, wood, wheel-barrows – anything thing that could be used by children on their terms to ignite their imaginations.

So here’s the plan.

We plan to build a place apart from the rest of camp, name as of yet undetermined. We plan to include a running water feature (we can pump up from our lake), an enormous sandbox that we’ll bury things in called an “Archeological Dig Site,” some tunnels through various hills and walls, to convert what used to be a large stage into some other manner of play-feature (perhaps a boat?), lots of “loose parts” for kids to build with like lumber, tires, blocks, crates, PVC piping, shovels, wheel-barrows, etc, two towers near the fence so kids can keep “look out,” some picnic tables in the shade where kids can relax and converse with each other, a garden where kids can plant vegetables and tend to them, paints for children to decorate the area, and much more. We hope to also leave a large section untouched so kids can use the loose parts to impact the area directly, building upon it gains popularity.

And now for a bit of awesome news, and a major reveal! A family in Baldwinsville has agreed to donate an incredible piece of playground equipment as a centerpiece for fun and excitement. That’s a 15 foot slide, 3 swings, a tree house area with a captain’s steering wheel, ANOTHER tunnel slide, and a small climbing wall. Just amazing generosity that will really help us kick-start this area. We also may have some very exciting news coming through the pipeline about another big helper, but we’ll let you know when it’s official!

So, it sounds obvious when you really think about it – “Of course kids need to play!” But even at a place where we pride ourselves on freedom, choice, and being in the moment… we had become “helicopter counselors.” Confidence comes from being able to make one’s own fun when one is so inclined, and not from thinking that there is always someone out there who can make your fun for you. While we’ll certainly have the same great structured activities for summer camp 2013 that we always have (and lots of brand new activities as well!), we also want to let kids who want to make their own fun do it.

Know someone from Syracuse, Rome, Utica, or anywhere in Central New York that needs a place to come and be themselves, build confidence, and make some lifelong friends? Send them out to our summer camp and retreat center and we promise, they won’t regret it.

One of the most common things I hear when I discuss working with children is that people would like to work on their patience. They’ll admit that, at times, they become impatient with their children, and this leads to feelings of regret. The oft-quoted verse from Galatians affirms that patience is a quintessential component of the Spirit itself:

Galatians 5: 22-23 says:

22 But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, 23 gentleness and self-control. Against such things there is no law.

But what is patience? Is it the simple suppression of a negative feeling, like boredom, anger, or frustration? Is that the purity of emotion that Jesus hoped we would seek? Or is there something more?

Indeed, it seems like going from open impatience with children to suppressing outright demonstrations of anger and frustration is a step in the right direction. We certainly require that our summer camp staff do their absolute best to not outwardly display impatience.

But last summer, one of our camp counselors taught us something brand new about patience. Something that has completely rewritten a portion of the Vanderkamp-Method “rule book.” I’d love to share that story with you now.

A Summer Camp Counselor Redefines Patience

During summer camp 2012, a young woman came to camp that many would classify as having “special needs.” She became overstimulated easily. She was very demanding of attention. She was considered to be underdeveloped emotionally. She would love and hug you one minute, and lash out the next, if she felt you weren’t meeting her exact need. We had been warned by her pastor, her mother, her peers: this was a girl that was hard to deal with.

So she came to summer camp, and we expected to need to be patient with her. Many counselors rose to the presumed challenge, but there was one counselor in particular who was really going above and beyond. Every morning she would brush his long hair at breakfast. He would walk with her from place to place, allow her to vent emotions, and listen to long stories where she claimed herself a victim. He did this all without complaint. Impressed with his incredible tolerance, I approached him.

“Hey, Matt,” I said, “I am just so impressed with how patient you’ve been.”

“What do you mean?” he asked.

“With [the young girl],” I responded. “It seems like it’s been a demanding situation, and you haven’t batted an eye. I’m so thankful that she has you to work with her.”

“Oh. Thanks. It doesn’t really feel like “patience,” though. I like working with her. She needs help, and most people don’t give her a chance. But this is why I came here to be a counselor. I am the one who ought to be thankful to get a chance to work with her.”

I walked away, stunned. Then I turned it over in my head. I was witnessing true Christ-like patience here. He wasn’t silently steaming, waiting for her to stop yelling about things. He wasn’t checking his watch, hoping she’d be done brushing his hair so he could go play games in the field. He required no breathing exercises to make it through his time with her. He didn’t resent the time he spent with her at all. He relished it. He knew she needed help, and was grateful to be the one helping.

In that moment, he totally redefined for me what I hope for in myself when being patient. Jesus wasn’t hoping we could mask our frustrations and show a condescending patience to some inferior person who was frustrating us, or hoping that we could sit around quietly, “being patient,” while wishing away some boring time in our lives. Jesus was hoping we would be grateful for all moments in our lives, and especially those where we can give of ourselves for others.

Each moment is one given from God – and we can cultivate our own perspective on it. For Matt, patience in what would be conventionally challenging moments meant finding joy in them. Once we become so patient that we no longer feel the need to access our patience, we have turned one fruit of the spirit into another – we’ve turned patience into joy.

The word “patience” has a lot of emotional baggage attached to it in modern culture. At Vanderkamp, we’re working to establish that patience be just a step in the journey. A necessary incremental change before becoming truly joyful in challenging moments in life, but one that can be a pit stop, and not the final destination.

Our summer camp staff, this year, will be learning ways to transcend patience to help our summer campers in 2013 feel even more loved than they did last year. We absolutely can’t wait.

Some bonus tools to practice patience:

1) Counting frustrations: This is a powerful practice that requires one to keep a note-taking device on oneself. The task is simple: record the amount of times in a day that you outwardly express frustration. If you have time, make a note as to why. Then, establish a goal for yourself. This can be as simple as reducing the total expressed frustrations per day, or to stop becoming outwardly frustrated by a given thing. It is a common misconception that this would be “bottling things up,” but the opposite is true. Outwardly expressing frustrations has been shown to more tightly bind us to whatever caused the frustration, as our natural response will be to justify our reactions. Once you’ve mastered your outward frustration, this practice can be taken a step further to record positive and negative thoughts in a day. This is an intense practice that, for some, can be life changing.

2) Catching our thoughts: Many in Western culture tend to leave very little time between feeling an emotion and acting on it. One of the principle keys to becoming patient is recognizing feelings before they govern our actions. A great practice for creating gap time between emotions and outward responses is asking oneself, “Well, it seems like anger is arising in me. What should I do about this?” Once an action has been taken, it can not be taken back. By creating a gap time between the arrival of an emotion and our reaction to it, we allow our logical mind to handle more situations than our emotional mind. This is a great preventative to our logical mind scolding our emotional mind after our emotional mind has caused someone else harm through impatience.

The Vanderkamp Center is working to redefine the adult-child relationship by providing a love-centered Christian summer camp near Syracuse, Utica, and Rome. We also offer retreat facilities year round – we hope to see you soon!

2012 was a magical year for our summer camp in so many ways, and summer camp 2013 promises to be just as fun — but one thing that may never be re-created is the Love-Mobile.

What’s the Love-Mobile, you ask? I’m surprised you haven’t heard of it, or seen it as it’s whizzed through the Syrcause area on its way to various adventures!

During the last week of summer camp, we decided that it would be fun to let the kids decorate the cars of willing staff members. Most of us let them paint the windows, since the paint had warnings on it that made claims about it staining the actual paint of the car… but one counselor, Hannah, let the kids go all out, even letting them paint the interior!

The summer campers had a blast writing all sorts of loving phrases and well-wishes on Hannah’s car, and what made it more amazing was that Hannah kept her car decorated as long as she possibly could! There’s a rumor that it might still even have some of that paint on it, if you happen to see the love-mobile up close. But even if you did, it would only look a fraction as amazing as it did on that day. Luckily for you, we captured it on film. Enjoy!

The Vanderkamp Center is a Christian retreat center and summer camp located in Central New York, near Syracuse, Rome, and Utica. Last summer was our biggest yet, and we hope to see you in 2013!

Kids today feel so much pressure to be something they might not be.

They see the value society places on traits outside their control, like appearance, intelligence, or athletic ability. Adults will show them at an early age that these traits are very important by pointing them out (You’re so smart! Look at my pretty princess! Wow, you are getting so strong!). They will come to identify these traits as important, and try their hardest to be smarter, better looking, or more athletic.

The problem, of course, is that the pursuit of any of these characters traits does not lead to happiness. If happiness is the destination we hope for our children to reach, paths leading to what is conventionally called “success” are dead ends. Wealth has been shown to have little or no correlation with happiness after a certain threshold. Many academics spend their time angrily trying to “educate” the populace on this or that niche area where they are simply certain that the general public has it wrong – toiling in frustration instead of joyously sharing knowledge. Exercise can be a component of a happy life, but in and of itself, is not a path to happiness.

Time and time again, it is shown that happiness comes from within, so why do we encourage our children to find it without? To attempt to accumulate material goods, or athletic prowess, or academic superiority?

We can say for certain that the world is wealthier than it has ever been, and that there has never been a time in human history where information was so readily available. If we have never been wealthier, and never been more educated, it stands to reason that we should never have been happier, if wealth and education lead to happiness.

But many people aren’t happy. Especially kids, who try so desperately to pursue things that may very well be out of their control.

Through our summer camp program, we are looking to recast the dialogue surrounding interactions with children. Basically all literature written about working with children attempts to answer the question, “How can I get a child to do what I want [whether it’s behave, or get good grades, or not talk back, or sleep through the night]?”, and almost none of it tries to answer the question, “How can I help children feel happy the way they are?”

At Vanderkamp, we are trying to answer the second question. By employing cutting-edge child development theory through a Christian lens, we are trying to demonstrate to children just how special they are. We want to give them a retreat from all of the expectations that society places on them. Children who come here do not need to be anyone besides who they are. Our staff is trained to ignore conventionally “important” things like appearance, intelligence, and athletic ability, and is instead instructed to help children establish a value system based on, well, values.

Summer campers at Vanderkamp are constantly praised for the times when they are generous, or kind, or considerate. They are given real tools that they can bring to the rest of their lives to start down the road to happiness. Children need to learn to love themselves before they can share love with anyone else, and this includes their God.

In a new series of articles on the Vanderkamp Method this Spring, we hope to share some simple “take-home” tools that anyone can use to help each child realize how incredible he or she is. Each article will focus on a given tactic, and will contain both ways to employ these tactics effectively with children, and the benefits reaped as a result.

We’re done trying to figure out how to get children to be what we want them to be, but we’re confident that by helping them figure out who they are, they will breeze past whatever modest expectations we had of them (like “behaving”) and show us the amazing things they have to offer the world when allowed to simply be themselves. We hope you join us either by reading this article, or by signing up for Summer camp in 2013.

Know someone in the Syracuse, Utica, or Rome area who could benefit from a week of focusing on finding happiness within themselves? Have them contact us!

We had another full house at our retreat center during this year’s Winter Reunion retreat! Kids from summer camp and the fall retreat came together for 2 nights to ring in 2013 with style!

And the good news? We finally had some snow this year! Snow balls were thrown, sledding as crazy and fun, and of course, ga ga was a big hit. Ringing in the New Year by sending a lit up gaga ball down the flag pole was really something (see pictures below), but that really only paints a small portion of the picture. More importantly, we were able to get together to recharge our batteries. We were able to remember that we are perfect just the way God made us, and that we don’t need to worry about the social pressures placed on us from the rest of society.

For 2 nights, we got back to work rebuilding this incredible Christian community in a way that only we can – by letting children be free to associate with whom they please by doing what they please, so long as there isn’t a shred of teasing or bullying. Hopefully this will be enough to tide us over to summer camp 2013 – we are already waiting to reunite with all of our friends as SOON as possible!

Want to come back and see what’s going on some time sooner? We have a work day scheduled for May 18th, and open houses on April 20th and May 19th. We also have a Short term experience in mission happening during Spring Break – a 3 night trip to Schoharie county where we can spend our time giving back and being in community rather than sitting around doing nothing (or worse!).

But anyway! On to the pictures, hope you enjoy!

Ball Drop – Vanderkamp Style!

Being in charge of booking a retreat for a group of folks can be a really stressful endeavor. Which retreat center is right for you? With so many options, what are the major things that one should look out for when booking a retreat? This article hopes to give you some information on how to do your due diligence, so you can have peace of mind that you have taken all the steps necessary to give your retreat the highest chance of success.

Let’s start with a few questions you should ask yourself:

Who is coming on my retreat?
Choosing a retreat center for a group of people in their 80s should be a much different process than choosing a retreat center for a youth group, or a college soccer team, or a strategic business retreat. Know who the people are that you are trying to help have a good time, and then plan accordingly. The answer to this question will lead directly into the next one…

What are the goals of my retreat?
The first thing any retreat group should think about is what it hopes to accomplish on its retreat. Once you know the answer to this question, choosing a retreat center or hotel is a LOT easier. A family reunion group may want a space apart from other groups, where they can enjoy a lot of common space together throughout the day. A Church youth group probably wants to go someplace with a lot of recreational options. If your goal is to give people a weekend where they feel pampered, you’ll want to find a place with great amenities and food service. If your goal is to help a group of girl scouts learn wilderness survival skills, you’ll want rustic options with fire rings. But you always need to know what the goals are before you go searching for the right retreat center. Above all, these need to be your biggest concerns.

What is my price range?
Taking a retreat at the Ritz in New York City might be a luxurious experience, but is it necessarily the best bang for your buck? Could you schedule two retreats elsewhere for the price of one there? More? Price shopping from retreat center to retreat center is a terrific idea. The attitudes of your retreat guests will vary greatly based on how much they pay, and this isn’t something you want to be shy about. Get the costs up front (and make sure to ask for hidden fees or taxes! Non-profits are a great avenue for cost-reduction, since they aren’t taxed or regulated in the same way). Be honest with your guests about the costs, and if you want my advice, I’d collect the money in advance. People tend to have a much better attitude if they pay for something, and then experience it, versus experience something, and then pay for it. Picture the way you feel on an all inclusive vacation vs. the way you feel when the check comes when you are out to an expensive meal. The wine cost what??

After you’ve asked yourself these questions, you can get to the next step: data collection. Before you go calling retreat centers, make sure you have a good idea of the following information:

1) How many people you expect, and how many are DEFINITELY coming.
2) How old these folks are.
3) If you want meal service (if applicable, some retreat centers will force you to take their meals with them. We do not).
4) What dates you are targeting.
5) What your goals are.
6) If you have any special needs or accommodations (are any of your guests vegetarians? Gluten-free? In a wheelchair?)
6) How flexible any of the previous things are.

Trust me, any place you call will ask you some form of the previous questions. And remember – you are the customer. Any retreat center will be thrilled with your business, so don’t be shy about stating your needs!

Alright, you’ve collected your information, and you are ready to make your calls. You call up a retreat center, armed with all the information you need. They ask, “So do you have any questions?” Your answer is, “Yes!”

Some terrific questions to ask any retreat center include:

1) Can I come up and take a tour?
2) Do you have any references I can call about your retreat center?
3) Are linens included, or do they cost extra?
4) What other recreational activities are available, and what are their costs?
5) Do we have options as far as meals go (time, menu, etc)?
6) What sort of common space is available in my lodging?
7) How many bathrooms are in my lodge (if shared bathrooms)? Do any rooms have private bathrooms?
8) How far in advance do I need to book?
9) What sort of deposit is required, and when?

Booking a retreat doesn’t have to be stressful. Work with your retreat provider to customize things to tailor your experience to exactly what you are hoping for. And if they are unwilling to? Find someone else. Our goal at the Vanderkamp Center is to give every single guest the exact experience they are hoping for. From from-scratch and customizable menus, to brand new mattresses, to our private 45 acre lake, to our 100 year old Adirondack-style lodges – we will give you exactly the retreat you want. Check our rates page or facilities page for more details. Call today at 315-675-3651 or email james@vk.org to ask all the questions you’d like, or come visit any time!

The Vanderkamp Center is a Retreat Center just 45 minutes from Syracuse, and 35 minutes from the Syracuse Airport. Book your retreat today!

First on tap was to get rid of all of the leaves that had been accumulating against the sides of our main lodges. Living in the forest has its perks… but the leaves isn’t one of them! Luckily we had a dedicated team who was determined to get everything up and out. And they did! For their efforts, they also got a lot of fun rides on the old blue tractor… so a good time was had by all!

Of equal importance was getting our garden cleaned up. After raising 2,400 pounds of produce, there was a lot that needed to be done to get everything back in order for the dormant season. The surrounding fence was removed, and the volunteers removed and rolled up the irrigation system so the field can be plowed again. It was challenging, and tedious work… but our folks did great! Thank you so much to everyone who filled in throughout the day to work on this for us!

Fall and Winter at our Retreat Center means one commodity is going to be in higher demand than usual: firewood! With our lovely turn of the 20th century fireplaces comes a great cost in wood – but these volunteers turned a lot of downed trees into some very manageable logs that were then run through our wood-splitter by another group of volunteers. It was a real team effort – and now our retreat center is looking better, and it will feel warmer for guests this winter!

One of the projects we’ve been chipping away on for the last 6 months has been our maintenance barn. With the heart-breaking loss of the old dining hall barn, we have been working extremely hard trying to keep the maintenance barn in 1 piece. We’ve had volunteers from the First Presbyterian Church in Oneida faithfully helping us get the roof on, and now that that project is finished, we’ve jumped right into some other projects. Volunteers helped paint the exterior of the barn, and remove some old and wet insulation from the inside of the barn. It’s looking terrific, and we’re a short way away from this feeling like a brand new building!

We are so blessed to have so many terrific supporters out there. So to everyone who made it out, thank you so much! We would never be able to run this retreat center and summer camp without your help – it truly means the world to us!

If you can dream up anything you’d like to do when you come, you let us know. Whether you want to cross-country ski, sled down Cherry Hill, drink hot chocolate, reconnect with old friends from the Fall youth retreat or summer camp, it will be a blast! We’ll be sure to have a fire and we’ll definitely be ringing in the new year – Vanderkamp Style! Come and see your best friends and your favorite staff members, but be sure to bring a hat and gloves! Children and Adults are all welcome!

Last year’s fun included indoor Ga Ga, some safe snowball play, sledding (okay, last year it was mud-sledding), a Winter-themed version of predator and prey, some late night partying as we rung in the new year, and absolutely NO shortage of fun, faith, and friends!

Last year’s winter reunion sold out, and it was an incredible time – click here to read more. If you don’t want to miss out, I suggest calling or registering today, and not a moment later!

Click here to register now!
You will also need our registration form, as the software we use for online registration is not yet equipped for customizable forms. The form is here: Winter Reunion Registration Form. If you don’t feel like downloading it, we can also mail you one after you register online at one of the links above.