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Beyond Icebreakers: Facilitating Teambuilding Games with Purpose

Mitchell McWilliams

Games are more than fun—they’re vehicles for growth. When facilitated with care, teambuilding activities help campers and staff develop trust, communication, leadership, and problem-solving skills that transfer into daily life. This workshop will draw from the Camp Redwood Glen Games Manual and experiential education models to explore how games can be sequenced, briefed, and debriefed for maximum impact. Participants will experience several activities first-hand and learn practical facilitation techniques they can take back to their own camps.

Where Faith Meets Risk: Christ-Centered Adventure Recreation

Mitchell McWilliams

Adventure recreation has long been a powerful tool in camp ministry—but without intentional theology, it can drift toward self-promotion, thrill-seeking, or performance. This workshop explores how adventure can be rooted in the life and teachings of Jesus. Participants will examine how risk, wilderness, challenge, and community become pathways for discipleship. This session invites camp leaders to re-center adventure recreation on humility, trust, service, and dependence on God, shaping programs that form Christlike leaders rather than just confident participants.

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How Rebuilding the Board Helped Transform a Camp: A Board Development Story

Erin Hastey

In 2020, Redwood Christian Park’s board of directors had four members. The executive director of thirty years retired shortly after the pandemic broke out, and the staff of the 400-acre facility dwindled to four employees. Now, RCP’s board has twelve members, a healthy and supportive relationship with the executive director it hired three years ago, and better metrics than pre-pandemic. How did this camp go from barely surviving to thriving? This session tells the story of a board who stepped out in faith and rewrote its governance story. This presentation will include discussion of how to apply governance strategies.

Beyond the Front Desk: Serving With a Heart That is Contagious to All Staff

Faye Hogue

Faye will be sharing on how to serve our guests and staff in ways that will build bridges and insure that our groups feel like we are an extension of their ministry through love.Talking about the skills that have helped our teams to support one another through conflict and resolution. Serving each other in love and grace. Showing our guests that we are not just hearing them but that we HEARD what they said and that we are acting on it. After some practical examples of serving guests, we will open up for you to share the tools you have used in building the bridges with your own staff and guests.

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Food is Ministry

Randall Chastain & Raymond Molina

Food Is Ministry explores how food service can be a powerful expression of God’s calling. We will share our heart for using food as a tool for discipleship, connection, and care, showing how everyday moments in the kitchen become opportunities for ministry. This seminar will highlight practical ways to serve with intention, build relationships, and point others to Christ through hospitality. Food is never just about meals—it is about people, presence, and reflecting God’s love through faithful service.

Tour of Mount Hermon Kitchen

John Han

We will walk through the kitchen and front of house to discuss and answer any questions on how we operate at Mount Hermon and hopefully share some knowledge with each other to bring back to our respective camps to positively impact its guest experience

How to Keep Your Sanity in a Special Diet World

John Han

The goal is for all industry personnel to collaborate and identify best practices for cooking and serving guests with special diets. It goes beyond the "Big 4" of gluten-free, dairy-free, vegetarian, and vegan. How can we all share, learn, generate ideas, and discuss solutions to key takeaways so we are better equipped to serve our campers when we go back? How can we use special diets as a tool in our ministry?

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One Camp, One Mission: Bridging Silos through Servant Leadership and Trust

Becky Borst and Erik Johnson

This seminar tackles the challenges of interdepartmental communication by merging Patrick Lencioni’s Five Dysfunctions of a Team with the heart-centered principles of Blanchard, Hodges, and Hendry’s Lead Like Jesus. We identify that the root of communication breakdown is often a lack of trust and the presence of ego.

Participants will learn how to replace departmental ego with Christ-like humility, and will walk away with a deeper understanding of vulnerability-based trust. By prioritizing missional success, teams can move from artificial harmony to productive conflict. Join us to transform your staff from disconnected groups into one unified body, ready to model God’s love to every guest.

Leadership Excellence: Navigating Success with Your Team

Tom Beaumont

Every direct report needs to be able to answer the following questions: What is expected of me? Do I have what I need to be successful? Does authority accompany my responsibilities? How will I know how I am doing? It is the responsibility of a leader to make sure those they lead can answer these and that they are aware of the consequences if the questions are left without answers. Leadership is all about people and the movement of those people towards a desired outcome. We will dig into these questions as they relate to leading a successful team.

The Flow of Faithful Leadership - Leading Without Carrying What Isn't Yours

Bill Fernald

This session invites Christian camping leaders into a formative reflection on how leadership is meant to be carried. Drawing from global ministry experiences and long-standing friendships with leaders across cultures, the seminar explores common patterns of over-functioning, fatigue, and misplaced responsibility. Through a coherent leadership framework held in an invitational way, participants will consider what is truly theirs to carry—and what is not. The goal is not to prescribe a single model, but to help leaders remain faithful, sustainable, and aligned with the life-giving flow God intends, leading with trust rather than pressure.

Leading Change in Your Ministry

Steven Johnson

Change can be hard, even feared. But sometimes

changes is needed to help get your ministry to where

God is leading it. Learn some practical tools that will

assist you in leading your ministry into the future.

The Power of Maybe

Mark P Fisher

What if the breakthrough your camp needs isn’t a new strategy, but a better question? In this engaging session, Mark invites camp leaders to rediscover the power of curiosity and humility in leadership. You’ll explore how “maybe” creates stronger teams, healthier culture, and wiser decisions—especially in moments of uncertainty. Through relatable camp stories and practical insights, Mark equips leaders to turn challenges into opportunities for growth. Walk away encouraged, energized, and ready to lead with greater clarity, connection, and confidence.

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The Art of Repurposing: Maximizing Every Story You Tell

Jen Howver

Check back for description

A Year of Communications: From Blank Page to Content Plan

Jen Howver

Check back for description

Why Design, Art, and Creativity Matter

Ernie Zielsdorf

We’ll talk through some ways design, art, and creativity can have an impact on what you are doing. Whether it’s branding your organization, creating fun tees, or just enticingly curating your space. There are many ways that creativity comes into play in day-to-day life, and so we might as well come at it intentionally. This workshop will be very interactive and conversational. I would love to share my experience, give insights on working with designers, explore ways to be intentional with creativity, and work on some live illustration/design during our time to practice getting those creative juices flowing!

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Skits and Why They Matter

Christian Warne & Erin Neckers

Skits have been a part of camp since the early years of youth camps. It's important to be silly and let the kids laugh. However, have you asked whether they are making an impact? What skits make a spiritual impact on kids? How do you know when to be silly vs when to have a serious skit? We will teach you about skit techniques, yes and, and how skits can be used for the kingdom.

Tour of Mount Hermon Outdoor Science School

Gretchen Phillips

Get to see the property and inner workings of Mount Hermon Outdoor Science

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Chainsaw Safety and Maintenance

Josh Anacker

We will be covering both basic and advanced chainsaw safety and maintenance techniques. The gear and knowledge to stay safe. Tools and techniques for cleaning, maintaining, and repairing your saw.

Facility Tips, Hacks, and Other Info You Didn’t know You Needed to Know

Cam Staman

This roundtable seminar will target the fundamentals and medium complexities of managing camp facilities. This will be an open forum to shape the exact topics and share successful tips. We plan to discuss work flow and project management, provide a demonstration of both Asana and Clickup as management software, and review essential tools every maintenance worker should carry. We will also discuss how to manage different team sizes, as well as how to utilize different types of materials such as Pex A vs Pex B, PVC repair types and glues, various water heaters including the new Rannai storage tank. This forum will cover diverse topics and allow attendees to connect with each other and learn along the way.

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When Faith Meets Up with Culture

Tom Beaumont

Knowing and then responding to cultural shifts and challenges in and around your camp ministry can be a daunting task. Matters relating to sexuality and gender can be especially complicated to navigate. This is a seminar that deals less with policies and more about perspective. How do we look at these cultural matters from a big picture view in the context of what we do at camp? How does 'what we believe' become more than words on a page? How does our 'faith' grow feet?

Sabbath As Resistance

Steven Johnson

Life, especially in ministry, can feel over-scheduled and always busy. Dive into scripture to see why God commanded us to make sabbath a regular part of our routines and walk away with some practical ideas of how your family can develop habits of sabbath that will refill and empower you to live and thrive in both your personal and professional life.

Coaching the Anxious Generation

Mark P Fisher

Disconnect to Reconnect: Breaking Through the Anxiety Holding Kids (& Parents) Back

In this interactive session, we’ll explore how technology is impacting campers’ social and emotional development, the roadblocks parents face when deciding to send kids away, and what camps can do to ease those concerns. You’ll leave with practical tools to strengthen parent communication, design programs that foster resilience, and help campers truly disconnect to reconnect.

Building a Volunteer Mental Health Team

Joshua Kerr

Every camp faces the growing reality of mental health needs among both students and staff. This workshop explores how Christian camps can faithfully and effectively respond by integrating volunteer mental health professionals into their teams. Drawing from real stories, lessons learned, and recent trends, we’ll discuss how to build a sustainable model that strengthens both campers and staff. From the big picture to nuts and bolts, we'll envision how mental health ministry can support their mission of making disciples of Jesus Christ.