Camp Joshua a Model for Other States to Follow
Pro-Life Retreat Educates and Energizes Oregon Teens
By Holly Smith, Field Coordinator
You could call it a pro-life boot camp for teens, if it weren’t so fun. Days start at six in the morning and are packed until lights out at eleven. The three days are filled with field trips, pro-life games, and educational seminars and end with teens sleeping on bunk beds near people who start as strangers and end as friends. This is Camp Joshua.
For the past five years, Oregon Right to Life Educational Foundation (ORTLEF) has put on Camp Joshua for 16- to 21-year-old youth over their Spring Break. The teens come from all over Oregon to a retreat center just outside of the state capital and spend three days immersed in information about the nuts and bolts of the life issues. They also receive practical knowledge about how the government works, their role in and the history of the right-to-life movement, and how to start and what to do with a Teens for Life group.
According to the camp’s director, Kate Ewald, “Camp Joshua is a leadership camp, so its name came from Deuteronomy 30:19 [NIV]: As Moses passed the mantle of leadership to Joshua, he said, “This day ... I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life, so that you and your children may live.’” Ewald continued, “The mission statement is: ‘To train and equip pro-life youth to influence their peers today and become the pro-life leaders of tomorrow.’” (Even though they are actually pro-life leaders now!)
The training students receive in the seminars is reinforced by field trips to places where promoting the right to life is a way of life, including the Oregon Right to Life offices in Salem, a Portland pregnancy center, and a home for unwed mothers. They also meet with pro-life leaders in the state House and Senate and lobby their own elected representatives.
The pool of talent ORTLEF has recruited to conduct seminars is phenomenal. The experts’ presentations on stem cell research, physician-assisted suicide (which is legal in Oregon), abortion techniques, and fetal development are clinical, precise, and moving. Dr. Ken Wilson, president of Oregon Right to Life and a world-renowned surgeon, gives one of the most popular talks on the Biblical basis for being pro-life and the Christian responsibility to vote. Certainly the most emotional seminar is the one each year where post-abortive women and men share their stories of abortion and healing.
Following each seminar, several teens are randomly chosen to give “table talks,” impromptu speeches reacting to the presentation just offered. Not only do they practice speaking off the top of their heads, but table talks give them practice in public speaking and help them become more comfortable talking about life issues in front of their peers.
I’ve had the pleasure and the honor of being with the teens each of the past four years and I try to give them a sense of the national movement, its history, and its future, as well as background on federal legislation and ideas for ways to get and stay involved in pro-life activities. A fun seminar I participate in with Gayle Atteberry, Oregon Right to Life’s executive director, and other staff members is “When They Say, You Say,” which gives the teens a chance to ask professional pro-lifers how to respond to the arguments posed by their peers.
In case you’re wondering whether there’s time for fun and games, the answer is emphatically yes. The teens and staff have a great time and even spend their break times discussing life issues, and many of the games have a pro-life element.
For instance, the 17 teens who attended this year participated in “Camp J’s” version of The Apprentice, where two teams went head-to-head in producing pro-life commercials, cheers, letters to the editor, and skits.
The Donald, played by my husband (a Capitol Hill staffer and “Camp J” volunteer), fired and rehired and fired again until there were three campers left for the final competition, which was a mock lobbying encounter with Hillary Clinton about embryonic stem cell research. Remember, these brave teens got practice by lobbying their own state representatives, which would be unnerving to many adults in a place like Oregon.
Interestingly, this year’s Camp Joshua was held over Palm Sunday weekend, the weekend immediately following the removal of Terri Schindler Schiavo’s feeding tube. We were all closely following congressional efforts to save Terri’s life. Perhaps living in a state with legal assisted suicide has made these young people more sensitive to the plight of those facing euthanasia because the teens were closely following the case and universally understood why Terri had a right to life, and how her death could lead our country further down the slippery slope of the culture of death.
Camp Joshua is a wonderful and motivating experience for the teens who attend and the staff alike. It takes pro-life teens and, three days later, sends forth pro-life leaders equipped with the knowledge and skills to help change our culture. In five years, nearly 100 young pro-life leaders have emerged from Camp Joshua and are making their presence felt in their high schools and colleges. Just think how it would affect your state to have dozens of trained pro-life students educating their peers. Every state and community would be well served by investing some of their energies into similarly training their teens.