The Best Week of Your Life—that’s a pretty high standard to set for a week of summer camp. But the staff and volunteer leaders of Young Life have been making the promise to Oklahoma teenagers for more than 50 years. In fact, that promise typically sounds something like this: “If you don’t think a week at Young Life summer camp is the best week of your life, I’ll give you your money back.”

Eric Mixon, Area Director of Young Life in Edmond, says no one has ever asked for their money back. Young Life camps are that much fun. “We take them [campers] out of their everyday world and into a pristine place where the wonder of nature and God’s creation can get a grip on them…and we treat them like kings and queens for a week. It’s just a little taste of heaven.”

A week of Young Life camp is filled with high adventure, fun, great food, and excellent speakers. Each year more than 74,000 middle and high school students take advantage of the opportunity and escape to a Young Life property. They experience exciting activities like rappelling, mountain biking, ropes courses, and horseback riding. But to say that the week is defined by what they do doesn’t really get to the heart of what makes the week so unique and powerful. The Young Life ministry began in Gainesville, Texas in 1942 and has since spread around the world. What makes the ministry unique is that its staff and leaders spend the vast majority of their time hanging out with kids, loving them with no strings attached, and building friendships.

Those relationships, forged over the course of a school year, are part of the reason a week at Young Life camp is so powerful. Kids pile onto busses for the trip to Crooked Creek or Frontier in Colorado, Castaway in Minnesota, or Windy Gap in North Carolina (to name just four of the 21 camps Young Life operates in the U.S. and Canada) with leaders who’ve become friends.

“There’s a factor of trust in place even before a kid gets on the bus.” Mixon said. “That bond is so important because during the week at camp, kids tend to open up about the deepest areas of their lives. And even more critical, those leaders will return home with the kids and continue to spend time with them long after camp is over.”

The kids who go to camp spend the week in a cabin with their friends and leaders, participating in activities as a group. They eat every meal together family style, the entire cabin seated around a table. Those meals aren’t typical camp fare, either. A team of volunteers from around the country wait on each table, delivering food until kids have eaten their fill. And each night one of Young Life’s gifted speakers presents a piece of the puzzle that, like every one of us, kids are trying to put together. Questions like “Who am I?,” “Why am I on this planet?,” and “Is God real, and if He is, how do I know Him?” are addressed in relevant and logical ways.

Those talks give way to what kids say is their favorite part of the Young Life camp experience—cabin time. It’s a chance for every kid to ask any question or make any comment about the important issues of life. Those questions, about God, family, love, pain, hopes, and dreams are all asked within a cabin of friends whom they’ve come to trust.

Mixon says many of these kids feel it’s the first time someone has truly listened to their questions. “Young Life really tries to seek out kids who feel distant from God—kids who have been wounded by life. A lot of the time they’re the kind of kids who don’t feel comfortable taking their questions to a church.”

And while Young Life is certainly a Christian ministry and its camps are clearly Christian, campers are astounded by how “real life” it all feels. One of those kids, Edmond North alum Michael Cotton, went to camp in the summer of 2001 as an atheist. Cotton says he enjoyed how Young Leaders never judged him because he didn’t believe in God. During those cabin times, Cotton began to ask all the questions he never felt comfortable asking. At the end of the week, Cotton traded his belief in nothing for belief in God. These days he’s working as a missionary in Afghanistan.

“Kids laugh like they’ve never laughed before,” Mixon said. “They do things they’ve never done before, things they didn’t think they could do. And they experience all of these things in the context of getting to know the God of the Universe.” Mixon summed it up, “They go in thinking this will be a fun seven days at camp, and they leave changed forever in some of the most profound ways imaginable.”

Again, Mixon said, this is where the previously-established relationships between kids and Young Life leaders is so critical. As these kids return home, they take new steps toward spiritual growth and maturity. And those Young Life leaders who’ve earned their trust are there to walk with them. And after checking with Young Life staff and leaders who’ve been involved in the ministry since it began, not one can remember a kid who went to camp and asked for their money back. “The Best Week of Your Life” guarantee. Still being made. Still standing after all these years.

Learn More
To learn more about Young Life, summer camping, or volunteer opportunities, call Oklahoma City’s Young Life office at 405-755-4440 or check out their website at YoungLife.org. You’ll find information about the ministry from around the world as well as links to the local ministry website.

Rob Morris is a news producer at KFOR in Oklahoma City. He’s also currently working on his first novel.