LEARNING FROM  HISTORY

By Edith Blumhofer

 

The following is a transcript of a talk given by Prof. Blumhofer on August 26, 2006

at Pilgrim Camp, during the celebration of camp’s 60th anniversary.

 

In his Autobiography, Mark Twain wrote:  “The historian who would convey the truth must lie.  Often he must enlarge the truth by diameters, otherwise his audience would not be able to see it.”   Historians tend to be a bit more sanguine about our work, though we do debate objectivity and truthfulness and admit that we never fully present the past.  I do not propose to sketch the history of Pilgrim Camp.  Rather, I want to ask a simple question:  “Looking back, what made Pilgrim Camp Pilgrim Camp?” Or, put another way, “What can we learn from the past that will help us discern what this place should be in the present and future?”    As times change, what clues do we find in the past to aspects of camp’s purpose that cannot change without fundamentally altering what camp is?

            One caveat:  People generally sentimentalize the past.  Menus offer old-fashioned food; businesses promote old-fashioned values.  Protestants used to sing about an “old-fashioned meeting in an old-fashioned place where some old-fashioned people had some old-fashioned grace” and profess that they “liked it far better in the old-fashioned way.”  Camp meetings and revivals feature songs about “old-time power” and “old-time religion”—“Give me that old-time religion/It’s good enough for me.”  The notion that the past was somehow better than the present is as old as recorded history, and so it is important to remind ourselves at the outset that there is no rosy Christian past—not even at Pilgrim Camp.  People have always been flawed, and the saints of the church have generally been the first to acknowledge their own human frailty.  And while it is satisfying to reminisce, attempts to recreate the past are not productive.  Unlike adherents of Eastern religions, Christians have a linear view of history:  history has a beginning and an end, and it is moving forward, not flowing in cycles.  We are called not to hold on to the past but to commemorate God’s faithfulness in the past as a reminder of His absolute dependability today and tomorrow.  That is what Old Testament markers and feasts were about.  They were regular recollections of God’s past acts that assured later generations of God’s character, grace, and mercy for the present and future.  As we consider aspects of camp’s history, we will find markers placed by the people who established this place—markers they intended as reminders of what they intended this place to be.

 

Context

First, consider the broader context.  Pilgrim Camp began in 1946 at about the same time that American evangelicals across the country were launching new youth ministries, including camps.  Two well-known ones are nearby—Word of Life and Camp of the Woods.   These camps were part of a new concerted effort by younger evangelical leaders like Jack Wyrtzen, Percy Crawford, Billy Graham, and Torrey Johnson that included youth rallies, radio broadcasts, and youth-oriented evangelism as well as camps.  These post-World War II camps tended to grow out of urban-centered ministries.  The idea was to offer youth opportunities for spiritual growth, fellowship, and outdoor activities in settings away from the distractions of post-World War II urban life.   More than most Christians, American evangelicals explicitly targeted young people, and camps were part of the evidence of their strong commitment to the next generation.  Pilgrim Camp fits into this broader evangelical trend.

 

Roots:  Ridgewood Pentecostal Fellowship

Pilgrim Camp’s particular roots are in the Ridgewood Pentecostal Fellowship.  The Fellowship’s founder, Hans Waldvogel, had the vision for camp and also provided substantial financial support.  The first campers were Ridgewood Sunday school youth, but Uncle Hans also had adults in mind.  In the 1940s, most people who attended Fellowship churches lived in crowded apartments, worked long hours, and traveled seldom.  Uncle Hans thought of Camp as a place where they could take a few days for rest and renewal.  In 1946, Gordon and Caroline Gardiner, Edwin and Edith Waldvogel, and Karl and Gertrude Sailer found the property that became Pilgrim Camp.  The Gardiners became camp directors while the Sailers closed a flourishing business in New York City to move their family to Brant Lake and care for the property.  Karl Sailer, Edwin Waldvogel, and volunteers from fellowship churches built the house that became the Sailers’ home and Pilgrim’s Rest.

 

The ethos of the Ridgewood Fellowship shaped Pilgrim Camp.  When Camp opened, Uncle Hans had been pastor at the Ridgewood Pentecostal Church for 21 years, and during those years evangelistic efforts around New York City birthed a network of churches that included as well the congregation in Elizabeth, New Jersey pastored by Rudy Kalis.  These congregations shared several distinctives: 

  1. They were independent congregations without denominational affiliation;
  2. Directly or indirectly they were influenced by the Pentecostal leaders associated with the Zion Faith Homes in Zion, Illinois.  There after 1907 men and women who had first entered the ministry under John Alexander Dowie, an outspoken advocate of holiness and divine healing, embraced the new Pentecostal movement.   Within a few years, they opened Faith Homes to train young people for the ministry.   Hans Waldvogel spent time in the Faith Homes where ministers like Martha Wing Robinson and Eugene Brooks taught people to “wait on God” and acknowledge in practical ways the implications of the reign of Christ within.  Faith Home spirituality was Christ-centered, and worship was marked by the exercise of spiritual gifts like prophecy and words of knowledge as well as tongues and interpretation.  Zion ministers tended to see the Pentecostal experience as the Holy Spirit revealing Christ to the soul.  The Zion Faith Homes stood somewhat apart from the larger Pentecostal movement, and the Ridgewood Fellowship did, too.
  3. The Ridgewood Fellowship was emphatically evangelistic.  While still an associate in his father’s German Baptist church, Uncle Hans was first attracted to Pentecostals because they held street meetings near his parents’ parsonage in Kenosha, Wisconsin.  Evangelism was his heartbeat.
  4. The Ridgewood Pentecostal Church had German roots and a decided bent toward German pietist rhetoric and style.  German pietists resisted formal religion, celebrated the new birth, promoted Bible study, undertook missionary work, showed their faith by their works, and invigorated the larger church.  They coveted corporate revival and personal spiritual renewal, had a Christ-centered piety, and engaged in expressive worship that made much of congregational singing.  The founding members of the Ridgewood Pentecostal Church manifested these traits, which also broadly influenced early American evangelicalism, and as Ridgewood DNA spread in church plants in other parts of the city, these emphases continued. 

 

Pilgrim Camp quickly became a premier Fellowship venue.  People from the various congregations mingled, and ministers and missionaries from the different churches preached, each using their own gifts to expand on the cluster of themes that gave the Ridgewood Fellowship its particular identity.  From the outset, the camp’s extended family included as well Helen and Joseph Wannenmacher and Alice Reynolds Flower.

 

Pilgrims

            Puritans

After examining context and immediate roots, historians look for clues in the subject itself.  We have established that Pilgrim Camp was not an anomaly:  rather, it was part of a larger trend to found non-denominational Christian camps.  We have seen that the Ridgewood Fellowship’s distinctives shaped Camp’s practice.  But while what we might call Ridgewood Fellowship DNA molded Camp, early Camp leaders also chose to feature particular themes in harmony with Fellowship emphases.   Camp was a place apart where certain values could be cultivated and the place itself could be structured to highlight certain values. 

One Camp theme clearly centers in the word “Pilgrim.”  Why is Camp called Pilgrim Camp?  I asked my dad, and he agreed that there is a two-word answer:  Gordon Gardiner.

 Gordon Gardiner graduated from Wheaton College with a major in history, and he was also proud of his family ties to New England.  He gave camp a New England flavor by incorporating the Pilgrims into its fabric.  Look at the names on rooms and buildings: it’s like taking a trip to Plymouth Colony.  William Brewster was a Pilgrim leader and lay preacher; Edward Winslow negotiated with Native Americans and represented Plymouth Colony in England; John Carver was the Plymouth Colony’s first governor; William Bradford wrote Plymouth’s classic history, “Of Plymouth Plantation.”  John Robinson was the Pilgrim’s pastor in Holland.  Miles Standish and John Alden were prominent in the public affairs of Plymouth Colony and were memorialized in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem “The Courtship of Myles Standish.”  Robert Cushman was a Puritan preacher who visited Plymouth Colony in 1621 and delivered the only sermon preached in Plymouth for which the text has survived.  Prudence, Charity, Mercy, Faith and other virtues were common Plymouth female names.

 

The Pilgrim theme is a bit muddled around camp by the introduction of Puritan names from Plymouth’s rival colony to the north in Massachusetts Bay.  Generations of Mayhews were Bay Colony pastors—Jonathan was a famous champion of the American Revolution.  Cotton and Mather—aptly two sides of the same Camp building—represent either John Cotton and Richard Mather, both influential Bay Colony pastors, or their descendant, the pastor, scholar, and historian Cotton Mather.  Eliot commemorates the saintly missionary to Native Americans just outside Boston.  A page from John Eliot’s translation of the Bible (the first Bible printed in the American colonies) hangs in the lodge, and the Village cabins in Natick take the name of the town where Eliot’s native converts lived.  Brainerd honors David Brainerd, another missionary to Native Americans.  Richard Baxter (Baxter’s Rest), on the other hand, never left England but had a profound evangelical influence on the Anglican Church.  Camp buildings, then, recall Pilgrims and other Puritans.  Was this a whim of Gordon Gardiner’s, or did it have intent?  The answer is probably a bit of each.

 

The Pilgrims were Separatists who at great personal cost resisted cultural accommodation and the requirements of the established Church of England.  They were not all saints—as they put it, there were a fair number of “strangers” among them—but the ones whose names hang above Camp doors were people of character whose faith shaped their understanding of the times and summoned them to stand apart.  The same is true of the other Puritans commemorated.  While they were not Separatists, they disagreed on principle with some of the practice of the Church of England and chose to leave to establish a colony patterned on biblical principles.  There is a bit of patriotism in the use of these names, and a dash of New England pride, but the summons to be people of Christian conviction is also clear. These references to American history bring to mind the choices people made in very different times to stand apart from their culture and to order their private lives and corporate worship around scripture.  They challenge us to be people of integrity and character, rooting our lives in scripture and reaching out to others with the Gospel.   They surround us at camp at every turn.

     

            Pilgrim’s Progress

The word Pilgrim has a second reference, intertwined with the first but distinct in important ways—it recalls John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress.  Only the Bible has been more popular in Protestant homes than Pilgrim’s Progress, the allegory of the Christian life that John Bunyan wrote in prison.

 

Bunyan was born in England in 1628 and grew up amid religious and political unrest.  In 1649, the Puritan majority in Parliament beheaded King Charles I and established a Protectorate, guaranteeing freedom of worship to all Protestants.  The new government brutally suppressed Catholics in Ireland but failed to maintain civil order at home.  In 1660, Parliament reestablished the monarchy.  Charles II returned from exile in France determined to uproot Puritans and other dissenters from the Church of England.  A series of edicts enforced conformity, and people like John Bunyan suffered the consequences.  As a Baptist with Puritan principles, Bunyan spent twelve years in prison for refusing to conform to the established church.  During that time, he wrote The Pilgrim’s Progress From This World to That Which is to Come.  To most of us, it is a familiar text, an imagination of the Christian life as pilgrimage told, as Bunyan put it, “under the similitude of a dream” and liberally sprinkled with quotations from the Geneva Bible.  To critics who objected to his use of metaphor and allegory to present the Gospel, Bunyan addressed a poem defending his text:

                        This Book is writ in such a Dialect,

                        As may the minds of listless men affect:

                        It seems a Novelty, and yet contains

                        Nothing but sound and honest Gospel-strains.

Read Pilgrim’s Progress, and look around Camp—Campers in the Village live in cabins called Hopeful, Faithful, Valiant, Great-Heart—virtues personified in Pilgrim’s Progress.  Charity, Piety, Prudence, Wisdom and other names on Camp doors play prominent roles in Bunyan’s text.  Bunyan has cherubs and seraphs, a shepherd’s cote, and more. 

Bunyan’s text deals with the realities of lived Christianity:   here we encounter legalism, ignorance, unbelief, hypocrisy, discouragement, warfare, temptation, martyrdom, and hell but also the spiritual refreshings and Gospel encouragement that help Pilgrim along on his journey.   A drink from a refreshing stream enables Pilgrim to climb a hill called Difficulty:

 

                        This hill, though high, I covet to ascend;

                        The difficulty shall not me offend. 

                        For I perceive the way to Life lies here;

                        Come, pluck up heart; Let’s neither faint nor fear.

 

Pilgrim’s soul delights in the richness of Beulah land, and in good time he reaches the Celestial City.  No one who has spent time around Pilgrim Camp can fail to recognize the Christ-centered piety with which Part II of Bunyan’s text throbs as Pilgrims approach the end of their journey:

 

I am going now to see that head that was crowned with thorns, and that face that was spit upon for me.

I have formerly lived by hearsay and faith but now I go where I shall live by sight, and shall be with him in whose company I delight myself.

I have loved to hear my Lord spoken of; and wherever I have seen the print of his shoe in the earth, there I have coveted to set my foot to.
 
His name to me has been as a civet-box; yea, sweeter than all perfume. His voice to me has been most sweet; and his countenance I have more desired than they that have most desired the light of the sun. His word I did use to gather for my food, and for antidotes against my faintings. 'He has held me, and hath kept me from mine iniquities; yea, my steps hath he strengthened in his way.'

 

Bunyan’s words sound archaic now, but his message is timeless, and he makes a strong case that seeing one’s self as a pilgrim is in itself a worthy goal, a Christian disposition essential to obtaining “the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus”:

Who would true valour see,
Let him come hither;

One here will constant be,
Come wind, come weather
There’s no discouragement
Shall make him once relent
His first avowed intent
To be a pilgrim.

Whoso beset him round
With dismal stories
Do but themselves confound;
His strength the more is.
No lion can him fright,
He’ll with a giant fight,
He will have a right
To be a pilgrim.

Hobgoblin nor foul fiend
Can daunt his spirit,
He knows he at the end
Shall life inherit.
Then fancies fly away,
He’ll fear not what men say,
He’ll labor night and day
To be a pilgrim.

 

Songs

If the camp name offers clues to camp values, so do the favorite hymns that generations of camp visitors have sung.  One of the best ways to describe what camp is all about is to look at the congregational songs most obviously associated with Pilgrim Camp.  The songs congregations sing function as identity markers:  they reflect and they also shape group identities.  In the late 18th century, Methodists sang only the hymns compiled by John Wesley in Hymns for the People Called Methodists.  Presbyterians sang psalms, and Congregationalists set to music the poems of Isaac Watts.  What Christians sang revealed who they were—where they fit on the Christian landscape.  People who sang “Jesus Lover of My Soul,” were Methodists.  In the United States, the story was more complicated from the beginning because the musical traditions colonists brought with them intermingled and cross-fertilized, and the geography of the United States—especially apparently limitless space eroded cherished European traditions of Christian song.   Yet one can deduce a lot about a congregation by examining its songs.

Camp, too, has its set of hymns and gospel songs that reveal identity and relate the camp to larger movements on the religious landscape. The other day I talked to my dad about the songs he thought “said” camp, and here is the short list he suggested:  “Holiness Unto the Lord”; “Live Out Thy Life Within Me”; “A Life of Overcoming”; “O Worship the Lord in the Beauty of Holiness”; “Like a River Glorious”; “Truhearted, Wholehearted”; “Trust and Obey”; “The Name of Jesus is so Sweet.”  The hymnal of camp favorites includes many more that we commonly sing, but this short list gets at the movements that have most directly shaped camp’s central message.  “Holiness Unto the Lord” reminds us of the importance of holiness teaching in the formative spirituality of camp founders; “A Life of Overcoming;” “Truehearted-Wholehearted;” “Live Out Thy Life Within Me;” and “Like a River Glorious” suggest the influence of the Higher Christian Life and Keswick Movements; “O Worship the Lord in the Beauty of Holiness” or “Trust and Obey” come from the era of Dwight Moody’s revivals and Ira Sankey’s gospel songs.  Those three movements directly shaped Pilgrim Camp’s founders’  views of the Christian life and, with influences from Zion City, influence its Pentecostal identity.  People often say that camp is a place apart, hard to peg on the American religious landscape.  That is due in part to the way in which emphases from various experience-oriented evangelical movements have always intermingled here—a holiness stress on separation from the world, the cleansing blood and the empowering Spirit; the distinctive Keswick view on the overcoming life and the reign of Christ within the soul; the testimony, exhortation, and praise found in gospel hymns; a Pentecostal affirmation of spiritual gifts and spontaneous worship.  These movements are theologically and historically distinct, but in the hymnal and in camp practice, they each contribute something to the mix that shapes camp identity.

 

The Holiness Movement: 

Less than 20 years after John Wesley died, some American Methodists  worried that Wesley’s emphasis on Christian perfection (also called perfect love, or holiness, or sanctification) was being pushed aside amid pressures to evangelize the westward-moving American population.  Influential northeastern Methodists banded together in an association to promote the idea that the call to holiness was central to the Gospel.  They believed that the preaching of Christian perfection was “the reason God hath raised up the people called Methodists.”  In time a handful of denominations emerged from this Methodist emphasis on holiness—the Wesleyan Methodists, the Free Methodist Church, the Church of the Nazarene, the Salvation Army—as did enormous camp meetings at places like Round Lake, NY and Ocean Grove, NJ where tens of thousands gathered annually to pursue the blessing of sanctification.  Wesley had taught Methodists that sanctification might be gradual or instantaneous:  his passion focused less on timing than on transformation.  American holiness preachers modified Wesley by presenting holiness as an instantaneous experience, as summarized, for example, in Phoebe Palmer’s hymn, “The Cleansing Wave:”

                        The cleansing stream I see, I see,

                        I plunge and oh, it cleanseth me. .  .

                        I rise to walk in Heaven’s own light

                        Above the world and sin.

They also used another metaphor familiar around Pilgrim Camp—that of the altar.  “Is your all on the altar of sacrifice laid?” asked one holiness song.  If it was, the altar (Christ) sanctified the gift and made the sacrifice holy.  By this reckoning, entire sanctification was the same thing as entire consecration.

Many people whose names stand above songs in the Pilgrim Camp hymnal were prominently associated with this American holiness movement—Mary James (“All for Jesus,”  “Companionship with Jesus”), William J. Kirkpatrick, Herbert Booth, Fanny J. Crosby, Mrs. C. H. Morris to name a few.

Pilgrim Camp’s theme song, “Holiness Unto the Lord,” captures the essence of Holiness piety.  It was written by Leila Morris, a sight-impaired Ohio Methodist who was sanctified at a Maryland camp meeting and immediately began writing holiness lyrics.  “Holiness Unto the Lord” reminds people of the holiness movement’s primary call to separation from the world; freedom from sin—and not just sin as objective reality, but the “bondage of sin”; purity of life; the indwelling of the Holy Spirit; the expectation of Christ’s return.  This song presents Pilgrim Camp’s foundational themes, and its selection suggests the importance of Holiness piety to those who set the camp’s direction.

The holiness movement also made much of the cleansing blood and the empowering Holy Spirit, themes prominent at camp and in popular camp hymns.  We sing numerous texts by the holiness hymnwriter Eliza Hewitt.  Her “Under the Blood” is another camp favorite with its reminder that the blood of Christ offers constant cleansing and protection.  Mary James was prominently associated with the Ocean Grove Camp Meeting Association for the Promotion of Holiness.  “O blessed fellowship divine/ O joy supremely sweet/Companionship with Jesus here makes life with bliss replete/In union with the purest one/I find my heaven on earth begun” exults in the experience of Christ’s presence that Holiness advocates cherished at a time when other emphases obscured that conception of the Christian life in the larger Anglo-American Protestant world.  Fanny Crosby’s “Blessed Assurance” evokes perfect submission, perfect delight, and perfect rest and derives from the same piety.  With John Sweney and William J. Kirkpatrick, Crosby produced dozens of songs that popularized holiness themes.  With Phoebe Palmer, and Eliza Hewitt, Crosby both mirrored and shaped the language of holiness movement devotion.  The theme of cleansing and heart purity courses through holiness hymns.  Whenever we sing Herbert Booth’s “Grace there is my every debt to pay/Blood to wash my every sin away/Power to keep me sinless day by day/For me, for me” we join the chorus of holiness song. 

For about half of the 19th century, the holiness movement commanded the energies of prominent American Methodists, from bishops to lay people.  In Manhattan, the regular Tuesday Meetings for the Promotion of Holiness attracted interdenominational and interracial audiences.  In 1885, the fiftieth anniversary of the Tuesday Meetings was an event of note celebrated in Manhattan’s most affluent Methodist Church.  Fanny Crosby wrote two hymns specifically for the occasion.

For the most part, though, the holiness movement coursed through the nation’s largest denomination, the Methodist Episcopal Church, North and South.  Presbyterians and other Christians whose roots were in the Reformed tradition had a different understanding of sanctification.  They regarded sanctification as a gradual process and resisted on theological grounds those who thought it an instantaneous transformation.  Though many agreed with the holiness view that most Christians lived beneath their privileges and never expected to experience what the New Testament taught, in the 1850s, some non-Methodists formed their own movement to advocate what they called the “higher Christian life.”  In time, it attracted a trans-Atlantic audience and birthed the Keswick Movement, named for annual summer conventions held since 1875 in the picturesque English village of Keswick.

 

Keswick and the Higher Christian Life

Keswick’s distinctive message focused on present salvation.  Instead of emphasizing entire sanctification, Keswick advocates taught the overcoming life, or “the subjugation of the sinful nature by the reign of Christ within the soul”.  (Keswick’s first theme song was “Jesus saves me now,” a song immediately translated into German (“Jesus errettet mich jetzt”) that was often sung at the Ridgewood Pentecostal Church.)  Keswick was an interdenominational and international movement, though many of its early promoters were Anglicans.  Pilgrim Camp guests will recognize names like F. B. Meyer, Andrew Murray, and Hannah Whitall Smith (The Christian’s Secret of a Happy Life), non-Anglicans prominently associated with Keswick’s version of the higher Christian life.  They challenged a generation to know Christ as their present, powerful Saviour.  That led naturally to an emphasis on the Holy Spirit as the revealer of Christ to the soul.  

People in sympathy with Keswick views put their convictions into hymns, and several of them are on our short list of Pilgrim Camp staples:  “A Life of Overcoming”; “Live Out Thy Life Within Me”; “Like a River Glorious”; “True-Hearted, Whole-hearted”.  Two of these come from the pen of Frances Ridley Havergal, and another was written by her frequent collaborator and close friend James Mountain.   Havergal’s prayer, “Live Out Thy Life Within Me” gives eloquent expression to a core camp message that was Havergal’s personal experience.

The daughter of an Anglican priest, Havergal grew up in a family devoted to evangelical religion and church music.  Both of her brothers became Anglican clergymen, and the three Havergal daughters were exceptionally active in lay ministries.  Havergal’s father composed and arranged church music and hymn tunes.  Frances Ridley (Ridley stood for the martyr, Nicholas Ridley) showed unusual musical abilities and became an accomplished singer and pianist.  At boarding school and under her father’s tutelage, she learned Latin, New Testament Greek, Old Testament Hebrew, French, Italian, and German and began writing poetry. 

Frances Ridley Havergal was confirmed at Worcester Cathedral 17 July 1854.  The solemn service made a deep and lasting impression, especially the words of the bishop’s prayer:  “Defend, O Lord, this Thy child with Thy heavenly grace, that she may continue Thine for ever, and daily increase in Thy Holy Spirit more and more, until she come unto Thy everlasting kingdom.”  Every year Havergal kept sacred the anniversary of her confirmation as a day of renewal of her consecration to God—“Thine for ever:”

 

                        Oh! “Thine for ever,” what a blessed thing

                        To be forever His who died for me!

                        My Saviour, all my life Thy praise I’ll sing,

                        Nor cease my song throughout eternity. (17 July 1854)

 

                        Now, Lord, I give myself to Thee,

                        I would be wholly Thine;

                        As Thou hast given Thyself to me,

                        And Thou art wholly mine;

                        Oh take me, seal me as Thine own,

                        Thine altogether—Thine alone.  (17 July 1876)

 

                        Only for Jesus! Lord keep it forever,

                        Sealed on the heart and engraved on the life!

                        Pulse of all gladness, and nerve of endeavour,

                        Secret of rest, and the strength of our strife!  (17 July 1877)

 

Toward the end of 1873, a friend sent Havergal a pamphlet titled “All for Jesus.”  Produced by people who taught the availability of a higher (or deeper) Christian life, the small publication awakened keen desire in Havergal’s soul: 

I know I love Jesus, and there are times when I feel such intensity of love to Him that I have not words to describe it,” she responded, “but I want to come nearer still. . . And all this, not exactly for my own joy alone, but for others.  So I want Jesus to speak to me, to say ‘many things’ to me, that I may speak for Him to others with real power.  It is not knowing doctrine, but being with Him, which will give this.   

 

In correspondence with friends, Havergal now admitted her need for “true” and “full” consecration.  “I see it all,” she wrote in December 1873, “and I HAVE the blessing.”  Explaining the wider lens through which she now viewed Christian experience, she wrote, “First I was shown that ‘the blood of Jesus Christ His Son cleanseth us from all sin,’ and then it was made plain to me that He who had thus cleansed me had power to keep me clean; so I just utterly yielded myself to Him, and utterly trusted Him to keep me.”

            Havergal  immediately began writing hymns and editing hymnals that spread the higher life message.  She collaborated with James Mountain, editor of the first Keswick Hymnal and author of “Like a River Glorious”  to produce the most influential British compilation of hymns expressing describing the blessings of the higher Christian life.  The Havergal song best known at camp may be

                        Live out Thy life within me,

                        O Jesus, King of Kings;

                        Be Thou Thyself the answer

                        To all my questionings.

                        Live out Thy life within me,

                        In all things have Thy way,

                        I the transparent medium

                        Thy glory to display.

                          

Like holiness emphases, Keswick teaching issued in Christ-centered piety that honored the Holy Spirit and promoted consecration and self-abnegation.   Princeton’s famous Benjamin Warfield objected strenuously to these forms of devotion.  What ever happened, he asked, to the robust piety expressed in hymns like Isaac Watts’ “Am I a soldier of the cross?”—“Sure, I must fight if I would reign/Increase my courage, Lord.”  People who wanted to be nothing, who were willing to live in moment-by-moment submission to Christ, seemed to the feisty Warfield to shun their Christian duty—they wanted to be “carried to the skies on flowery beds of ease while others fought to win the prize and sailed the bloody seas.”  Participants at Keswick begged to differ:  only the “overcoming life” assured effective Christian service.  One only became useful by stepping aside and allowing Christ to be All in All.

            Freda Hanbury’s “A Life of Overcoming” derives from the same higher life impulse as it coursed through British evangelicalism in the late 19th century.  “Like A River Glorious” brings into focus another aspect of Keswick teaching.  The encounter with God was always perfect, always complete—but it grew deeper, richer, fuller, every day. There was always more to follow, but this “more” was not new.   James Mountain’s text describes the life these people coveted, a life “hidden in the hollow of his blessed hand.” 

Perhaps the Higher Life movement’s most enduring popular legacy is its hymns.  For 125 years, lyrics by Frances Ridley Havergal and others have described, summoned, urged, assured, and prodded Christians to know the indwelling Christ, enlist under his banner, yield to his rule, and offer him loyal service.   “Live out Thy life within me” is perhaps the best summary of Keswick’s defining message, and it describes what Pilgrim Camp’s founders held up as normative Christian experience.

 

Gospel Songs

A third source of Camp favorites is the music popularized by Ira Sankey and D. L. Moody.  Sankey edited the 19th century’s most influential hymnals which were phenomenal best-sellers in the United States and Great Britain.  They featured especially songs suited to the revival campaigns that made his and Moody’s names household words in the English-speaking world.  Gospel songs testified to personal experience and admonished people to Christian service.  Number one in the Camp Favorites is “O, Worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness,” words and music by the Brooklyn Baptist pastor and hymnal editor Robert Lowry, an associate of Sankey’s  Mass revivals required singable catchy tunes and simple easy-to-learn lyrics.  Fanny Crosby seemed especially adept at providing them, but she was one of many who had a knack for the rhymed words of testimony, worship, or exhortation that Sankey found useful.  

“O worship the Lord” is more of a hymn than a gospel song, as is Crosby’s “To God be the Glory.”  Most of Lowry’s lyrics, like most of Crosby’s were more properly called gospel songs.  They featured refrains and focused on personal experience, individual response, and testimony.   The gospel song tradition provides many camp favorites—for example, testimonies like “Since Jesus Came Into My Heart” or “Now I Belong to Jesus.”   John Sammis wrote the words for “Trust and Obey” after one of D. L. Moody’s converts stood to testify about his intentions to live a Christian life.  The young man   stated his resolve simply to “trust and obey.”  Sammis’ five stanzas unpack the meaning of living out this resolve.  “The name of Jesus is so sweet”  recalls again the Christ-centered piety at the core of the American revival tradition.  Its author, Baptist pastor William C. Martin, composed as well such other camp favorites as “To Jesus every day I find my heart is closer drawn” and “Jesus shall lead me night and day.”

Of course campers also sing songs written by Pentecostals, or, more often, songs about the Holy Spirit that predate the Pentecostal movement— like “The Comforter Has Come” or “Old-Time Power”—that camp congregations invest with expanded meaning because they sing these words from a Pentecostal point of view. 

The songs most obviously associated with camp over the years are songs that represent movements in nineteenth-century evangelicalism that idealized a quality of religious experience that seemed elusive to many people.  Teaching associated with those movements meant a great deal to the people who brought camp into being.  They wove it into the fabric of camp itself:  without it, camp would be a very different place.

 

Conclusion:

So, in the end we have a hodgepodge.  Camp’s roots are not as neatly classifiable as are those of, say, Word of Life or Wheaton College’s Honey Rock Camp.  Pilgrim Camp’s core identity draws from many contexts, denominational and non-denominational, American and British.  Puritans, Pietists, Methodists, Holiness movements, proponents of the higher Christian life, and Pentecostals have all contributed to what Pilgrim Camp is.   From a theological point of view, the interweaving of these strands is an anomoly—these people shouldn’t be in the same chapter, much less on the same page.  But this interweaving represents something grand that becomes even grander if one turns the pages of camp hymnals.  Christians from all times, places, and affiliations who devoted themselves to knowing Christ share a bond that is most readily visible in devotional literature and hymns.  The words of Catholics (“Jesus, the very thought of thee with sweetness fills my breast”), Lutherans (“Jesus, Thy Boundless Love to me no thought can reach, no tongue declare”), Anglicans (“The church’s one foundation is Jesus Christ, her Lord”), Methodists (“Love divine, all loves excelling”), Presbyterians (“Jesus, What a friend for sinners, Jesus, lover of my soul”), Baptists (“How firm a foundation, ye saints of the Lord”), Congregationalists (“When I survey the wondrous cross”, or “Join all the glorious names of wisdom, love and power that mortals ever knew that angels ever bore/All are too poor to speak his worth/ too poor to set my Savior forth”) pulsate with the same convictions and desires.  Camp has a rich legacy of Christ-centered piety that stretches across all Christian history.  At Pilgrim Camp it is understood especially through lenses associated with the holiness and Keswick movements and evangelical revivalism, interwoven with Pentecostal experience. 

Many early American Pentecostals owed much to the holiness and Keswick movements:  in their enthusiasm for the present, most of their descendants no longer care much about that debt.  Today’s preoccupation with the here and now renders the past irrelevant.  But the past offers markers that help communities preserve their identity.  Bunyan’s Pilgrim is timeless as is the New England Puritans’ example of robust Bible-based faith.  Christian devotion across the ages pulsates with the call to be holy to know Christ.  These are Pilgrim Camp’s markers, and recalling and valuing them is essential if Pilgrim Camp’s future is to be faithful to its past.