Worship Band Camp 2019 is in the books! One of my favorite weeks of the year, Worship Camp takes rising 5th to 10th graders and teaches them to play instruments in a worship band. Even if the student has never picked up the instrument before, they will be playing pretty successfully in a worship band by the end of the camp. This was our 4th year and some of our kids have been with us long enough that we are running out of stuff to teach them! But they help pour into the younger campers and that is great to see.
The first day and a half of camp the students split into instrument groups in a drum, bass, acoustic guitar, electric guitar, keyboard, or vocal track. Instructors spend time teaching them in a group using methods that quickly get them ready to play songs with a band. You don’t have to master an instrument to play in a band because the other players take on some of the load of carrying the song and cover up some mistakes. By the afternoon of the second day, we have divided the campers into bands and they start rehearsing with them to prepare for a “Battle of the Bands” type competition which is only a day and a half away at that point!
In between instrument instruction and band rehearsal, we also play some crazy games, have devotions, and teach the group some basic music theory and other topics like how to survive a band rehearsal and how to play together as a band. Our main theme this year was “Build Your Life,” based upon 2 Peter 1:3-11 and the popular Christian song, “Build My Life.” Someone had the excellent idea to use a Jenga game as an illustration throughout the week, which really helped to drive the message home.
The leaders and instructors in this camp work hard. This camp is just like an overseas mission trip in the amount of planning that goes into it and the long busy days that happen once it starts. There are leaders on site well before 8:00am every day and we meet each evening after camp until about 7:00pm to get ready for the next day. The last day includes a cookout and a concert that night which isn’t over until around 9:00pm and there is some cleaning to do after that. So we consider this an at-home mission trip. But at the end of every camp we look back and know that it has been worth it!
I will write about three highlights of this particular camp in a few days, but here’s a video recap of this year’s camp so you can see how much fun we had.
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