Saturday, September 19, 1998

Camp meetings with preaching -- a long tradition

By MAUREEN HAYDEN

Scripps Howard News Service

Marie McCord can still remember being a little girl, sitting on the straw-covered floor in a lofty wooden building on a hot summer evening, transfixed by the man who stood before her. Clad all in white, with a halo of flaming red hair, he exhorted his listeners to turn away from a sinful life and sanctify their souls.

It was a breathtaking moment for the young Marie, and while she can no longer remember exactly what the evangelist said that day, the emotion that ran through the crowd is still clear in her memory.

"There was such fervor," she said, recalling the moment almost 70 years later, "a kind of excitement that didn't take place anywhere else you went."

The moment she was describing took place at a 10-day "camp meeting" in the 1920s in Oakland City, Ind., where hundreds of people had gathered to hear the Gospel delivered by traveling evangelists who mesmerized the crowds.

Miss McCord no longer sits on the straw, nor swats at the flies that used to converge in the old tabernacle where the meetings took place.

But on a hot August evening, she can still be found at a camp meeting, listening to the exhortations of evangelists seeking to save souls.

For many Christians, camp meetings may be a thing of the past, a quaint tradition that thrived a century ago but passed with the advent of modern times.

But in small Midwestern towns, camp meetings are still a part of the summer calendar, as routine as a county fair.

More than a hundred people turned out recently for a camp meeting in Chandler, Ind., where a traveling evangelist couple preached five nights in a row in an open-air shelter.

"It's hard to believe sometimes that they still exist," said Miss McCord, a retired Oakland City University professor who has written a history of a century of camp meetings in southern Indiana.

"Given where most churches seem to be today, it's interesting to know that some people still just want to hear preaching of the basic doctrine of the Gospel."

Camp meetings are a kind of spiritual revival with roots more than 250 years old. Their origin springs from the work of John Wesley, the founder of Methodism.

Wesley had his own spiritual conversion as a young man in the early 1700s and began preaching in the woods of rural England, often to the poor and typically outside of formal church buildings. It was a practice repeated a century later by Methodist ministers who traveled to the United States to seek converts.

It soon became a practice that moved outside of the Methodist church. By the mid-1800s, camp meetings were flourishing throughout the south and parts of the Midwest, Miss McCord said.

The camp meetings in southern Indiana were typical: Families would pack up their bedding into wagons and bring enough food and firewood to last through a 10-day stay.

They'd pitch their tents, often around an open-air structure called a tabernacle, and spend their days and evenings in worship.

The experiences were transforming, Miss McCord said.

"It's where a lot of people say they had their first real experience with the Holy Spirit," she said. "Once you've had that kind of experience, you keep going back for more."

In her book, "Called Unto Holiness: One Hundred Years of Camp Meeting in Oakland City, Indiana," she writes of just how transforming the experiences were, from the evangelists' points of view: Almost every evangelist who had preached in Oakland City since the first camp meeting in 1896 kept notes of the experience, and almost every one of them "claimed the greatest camp experience ever," she writes.

According to one set of notes Miss McCord discovered, a circus set up its tents right next to the camp meeting in 1897, hoping no doubt to steal away some of the crowd. But the notes say the attempt was futile, and the circus owners lost money that year.

The evangelists were passionate. In one description Miss McCord found of evangelist John Hatfield, the author writes: "John Hatfield can preach longer and louder and keep at it longer and shout more and jump higher and get more people to the altar and pray longer and harder than any man that walks on ground."

She also writes of the devotion of Oakland City-area residents to the camp meetings and their efforts to keep them going through two world wars and the Great Depression.

At one point in the late 1930s, the president of the association that sponsored the camp meetings accepted pledges of sweet corn and live chickens to help feed the throngs who attended.

Although the camp meetings have been nondenominational, their theme has been based on Wesley's teachings that humans can achieve holiness while on Earth.

Most of the 2,000 camp meetings held each summer in the United States are sponsored by the Christian Holiness Association, an interdenominational group of churches whose doctrines mirror the Wesleyan teachings.

In its simplest definition, holiness means to be without sin. It's not that believers think they are without sin once they are saved, but rather that they can work toward putting sin out of their lives, Miss McCord said.

Her book offers a passage from Paul's letter to the Corinthians to give insight into the meaning of holiness: "For ye are the temple of the living God; as God hath said, I will dwell in them ... dearly beloved, let us cleanse ourselves from all filthiness of the flesh and spirit, perfecting holiness in the fear of God."

It's still a message preached at the camp meetings.

"If you've never experienced what happens at a camp meeting, it's hard to explain," said Miss McCord. "But once you have, you keep going back for more. I guess that's why after more than 100 years, people still keep coming back."

(Maureen Hayden is a reporter for the Evansville Courier in Indiana.)