Just had a fun little revelation. I've always stumbled over Camp Bighorns referring to their staff as "missionaries". When we think of missionaries, even a non-Christian would think of someone who preaches about Jesus and goes off to some far away country to do so. I think most of us could agree that this is the first thing that comes to our mind.
But let's say we dissect that definition a little bit. We can break that down into two parts. First, a missionary tells people about the Good News of Jesus Christ, that he came for us and died to make up the difference between where we are and perfection or 100%. Now that's exactly what I and the other staff at camp are doing. It just happens to be that our audience is not an exotic people group on some remote island. Instead they're 'regular' people. They come from cities and towns and churches. Many of them already consider themselves "Christians". But how many of them realize the fullness of what Jesus came todo? How many of them, or us for that matter, can describe the beautiful, powerful loving nature of God? Especially when we're surrounded by "normal life" these things get forgotten or minimized. Through adventure, we can create metaphors for Gods love and his role in our lives. We can pose important questions and even start to understand what He's asking us to do in our lives. So, these are people getting to hear about the good news, mostly in a completely new context then they've ever experienced, as well as in a fullness they've never known.
Now onto our next obstacle. Missionaries are sent and go to exotic places like Papua New Guinea , Kenya and China. The reason they travel to these places is to go to the people who need to hear the good news. In places like Papua New Guinea, entire people groups even have not heard and experienced Gods love and direction fully. But couldn't we say that about our own society? We and the world have such a skewed view of God, Jesus and redemption that we lose most of it's meaty truth, if not all of us. If you went to a non-believer, say your next door neighbor or the person in the office next to you, what would they say about Jesus? "Oh he was a good guy who talked about good moral stuff". You may get lucky enough to hear "he did something nice for us". And so, we can establish that our own society needs to hear the good news just as much as someone in a far off land. It just happens to be that at Camp Bighorn, they travel to us. We teach Gods truth through adventure activities and our special campus community. And since you can't just go whitewater kayaking anywhere, we bring them to rural Montana, in the middle of the wilderness where God has already prepared so many places and experiences where His lessons can be taught.
And so, yes, we do not travel to exotic lands and translate the bible into a new language. Or maybe that's exactly what we do? Except that our version of Papua New Guinea is the great rock climbing spot behind camp. Our version of translating a bible into Tagalog is translating Gods love and truth into terms that our generation and society can understand.
God is doing great things through the missionaries at Camp Bighorn, and I am so proud that I get to be a part of it.
Cheers!
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