07/31/2024
The Good News -- Let me start with an invitation to any man who may read this -- there will be a Men's Bonfire Night on Saturday, October 5, 2024 at 5 PM at Faith Baptist Church in Franklin. Good food and fellowship, and we'd truly love to see you there!
The Bad News (to me anyway). Sadly, there will be no Men's Retreat at Camp Lebanon in 2024, and sadly, there most likely won't be another. Besides old age, the health issues of me and my faithful sidekick Jeff Mann have outpaced our ability to pull it off. The past couple of years has also seen the faithful help of Greg Smith, who also is just unable to do it anymore.
I've had generous offers from some men to join in and help but I'm having trouble justifying their hard work as well. You see, men today seem uninterested or unable to commit to separating from the world, and home, for even one night. That's not an indictment, just an observation that can be backed up. Actually over the years it had gone from being a 24 hour retreat to about 16-18 hours. Still, it has become difficult to get men to stay even that long, or even overnight.
Allow me to reminisce for a moment. For our first retreat in 1997 we had 24 men, all of whom stayed for 24 hours. The following years saw large crowds filling 2 cabins with an all time high of 59 in the early 2000's. However, crowd size didn't really matter so much as the content, in my mind at least. I always prayed for God to bring there whom He wanted to be there, or who could truly benefit from it. Those were the years that I rarely slept because I was too busy enjoying myself. Ministry can be fun yet exhausting if you let it be. Fellowshipping with men in a setting such as that was too rare, and the conversations that were more like counseling at 2 AM were a rare blessing especially. I vividly remember many.
Getting into the Word of God without the distractions of overall time constraints was freeing. Few men had cell phones in those early years, or won't so attached to them, that the focus was truly on the Word, on God, and on each other. The food was great and the fellowship sweet, at least to me it was. Bonfires would sometimes go to midnight, well after midnight once. The testimonies were honest, encouraging, and sometimes reviving.
Allow me to pontificate for a moment and I'll go sit down. Men in the church, not just my own local church, have become too busy. I may sound like an old man longing for "the good old days", and I do miss the days like those I described above, but I think it goes far beyond an annual retreat. We now fail to realize the importance of men coming out from among them and being separate. We don't understand the importance of men spending not quality, but spiritual time together.
We don't see the need to recharge, even if it is only once a year. We don't see the need to get away from the house and wife and kids in order to come home again refocused and refreshed. Family movie and game night, or Saturday morning sports, don't fill that need. And we fail to see the impact times like this can have on young men bonding with the older, which is a Biblical command. It's called discipleship, and churches everywhere aren't doing it well anymore.
Maybe over the years the place, themes, or format just grew old like me. Maybe our society, and the men of our churches, have become so distracted by technology and activity that sleeping in a bunk listening to other men snore one night a year is too much to overcome. We've lost the ability to be still (a theme one year by the way).
As I sit here with my back hurting and with other health issues, I am reminded of why the time has passed for me to do what I once did. But as was my desire, and as my pastor encouraged me to do along the way, was to keep going until we were able someday to hand off the reins to a younger generation to run with. As Paul encouraged his son in the faith, Timothy, to do in 2 Timothy 2:2, it was my hope that men would take what they had seen and heard and share it with others. Perhaps someday.
This page is so old and unused that no one may ever see this post, but it has been a good place for me to do a mind dump and vent. I hope something done starting 27 years ago has stuck -- 4 men were saved at retreats over the years so I know that has stuck -- but I hope other things have as well besides the sausage gravy to my beltline. If you ever attended a retreat, thank you for letting me try to be obedient. Thank you for allowing me to spend wonderful days doing this with my brothers in Christ, Jeff Mann and Dale Detro. And thank you for the sweet memories.
Time to sit down now.
