 It's summertime and if you grew up in the church, that means most likely you've had some exposure to some kind of church camp. Now for me, I didn't attend church camp too much, but for a lot of people, it characterizes their whole summer from the age of like eight to 18. And in today's video, I wanna respond to a lady on TikTok who basically documents her experience at church camp. It's important that you not take this personally or become defensive about it, but learn from her critiques, her exposing some of the things that she thinks are manipulative, because I think we should learn from them. I think it's not something that we should just cast aside and say, oh, she's not a Christian, so we should just kind of ignore what she's saying, but no, okay, maybe there's some truth to this, so let's dive in. Real quick here, I just wanna give a huge shout out to everyone on Patreon. Thank you so much guys for supporting my mission in equipping people to follow Jesus daily. If that's a mission that you wanna get behind, I'd ask you to click the link in my description and sign up today. All sorts of exclusive perks on there that I'm sure you'll love and you're supporting me and what I'm doing here and I can push forward to continue to make the content that I think is important for this time. Thanks so much, now on to the video. Cry Night is the quintessential experience of church camp. So picture this, you roll up in a giant van filled with teenagers who have all been raised to feel guilty for literally anything they think, say or do, because all humans are sinful and unworthy of the glory of God. And you're stuck in a cabin filled with girls and a youth leader that's just a really enthusiastic millennial Christian who really wants you to think that being a Christian is super cool. So the first night is all about the fun and the games. They get you running, they get you overstimulated, they get you exhausted. You're doing minute to win at games like no one has ever seen before. You're probably doing something borderline illegal, borderline child endangerment, but nobody cares. That's not the point. Someone will probably get injured and need to sit out for the rest of camp. Then you're sent to bed with some kind of message to ponder that usually leaves you awake at night, pondering what you could possibly be doing outside of church camp that displeases God, which is everything. The next day, the same thing, some kind of biblical based game, lots of team bonding, lots of social interaction, very little time to yourself, except for the repeated messages that remind you to feel guilty for existing. This continues for a couple of days. You get sent to bed once again with a message causing you to ponder something that makes you feel guilty. And then the last night comes. You have some kind of intense game night with lots of noise. And then you basically have like a laser light worship show where everybody is clapping and singing and being really loud. And then the slow music starts playing. It's probably an instrumental version of either oceans or overwhelmed. And then the speaker comes up and is like, okay, so I know a lot of you guys have a lot on your minds, a lot going on at home and your lives. And there's probably a lot of you in this room right now that have some things that you haven't even told anybody that you're just afraid to bring to the cross. And I need you to know that this is a place where you can confess that to God. You can lay your sins down at the cross. And if you just have something on your heart tonight that you've been wanting to tell God, I just want you to come up here and let us lay hands on you in prayer. And so then nobody will go up for a really long time until somebody eventually will feel so guilty that they make their way up and have people lay hands on them. And then everybody starts going up and getting hands laid on them. And then the overstimulation from the entire week sets in and everybody just starts crying because it's the first time you've really been able to sit and feel your guilt. But if you were in a girl's cabin, there was another layer of cry night where after this worship session happened, you went back to your cabins and you would sit in your bunk and basically go around in a circle and trauma dump on each other. And it was like the most intense game of trauma Olympics I've ever played in my entire life. And by the time everyone was done trauma dumping on each other, we would just be sobbing because we were trauma dumping on each other. And then you'd leave and be like, I'm a changed person. And then just repeat the same process at the next church camp. 10 commandments out of 10, highly recommend. I wanted to play that all the way through for you to hear her own. And I want us to approach this with compassion. One of the first things that jumps to my mind as she was describing a lot of this experience was a message of guilt, primarily a guilt and shame that was continually pushed onto the kids. And well, I think it's important that we understand the gravity of sin. And we can't understand the good news of the gospel without the bad news of sin. I do think in some camps, in some churches, in some places with some people there are is an overemphasis on this idea of sin and judgment and wrath and an exclusion or lack of emphasis on grace, on redemption, on forgiveness. And I think this can be echoed, especially in the early 2000s with purity culture in general. You think about the emphasis on being pure and saving yourself for marriage. And then there was all these sorts of analogies that they were using in order to kind of fear monger or just use fear or shame as a technique to keep people on the straight and narrow. At least that's what they thought they were doing. But in turn, they just gave people a complex of never being able to measure up and having this deep weight on their shoulder. And I think this applies to a lot of other areas as well. Just feeling like everything that I do, okay, I can't measure up, but then at the same time, not being given access to Jesus, kind of this message of you're screwed up so clean up your life or do better. And that puts a heavy weight, especially on a teenager. So I can totally resonate with this kind of messaging or being in these environments where it's very law, wrath, the judgment filled and not focused on the grace and the mercy and the redemption that Jesus provides. Alternatively or contrastly, you go to other camps and there's no mention of sin or there's no mention of God's wrath towards people. And it's just like, Jesus loves you and you're good. And it's just about love and just joy and peace and it's no mention of the bad news that without Jesus, we are guilty before God. We are dead in our trespasses and sins and that we need him. Otherwise we're destined for hell. Like we need that message as well. So throughout the video, she talks a lot about this idea of overstimulation or loud music or clapping or hype and all these things kind of get wrapped up. And in a proper context and proper doses, these things are fun, right? Like to do fun games or loud music and just a lot of things that, you know, or a lot of people like as big social times, like all these are great, but when it's constant, I don't think there's a good understanding of different personalities and different ways of the people are that some people really have trouble with this, that they get overstimulated quite easily. And I don't know if we're doing a good enough job creating those spaces for those folks and not even just the folks that are hypersensitive to it, but a lot of people, like when you're constantly around people 24-7, you are going to get exhausted. You're going to get a mentally drained. And when we talk about manipulation, that's one of the dangerous things when people, especially teenagers, get mentally exhausted and drained and they're constantly around people and they're physically exhausted as well. And their hormones are just going crazy and out of wax, this emotional whirlwind, this emotional hurricane, tornado, where you go home and you're whipped up, but all of a sudden, then you come off the high. A lot of people describe that kind of church camp high or Christian conference high. They get home and they're like on this high and that high isn't necessarily a bad thing because when you're around a lot of Christians in a cool environment, you're going to have that emotionally heightened experience. But even still, a lot of folks experience that to a crazy degree and they come home and they're like, whoa, I'm coming down off this. And all the things that they had thought or all the things about their life that they were going to change, it was all kind of whipped up because of their emotions. And so I think this is another emphasis too to not just rely on whipping people up into a tizzy with hype and with loud music and with lights and with cry night or whatever because I think that's part of it. Getting kids whipped up to the point where they're like, okay, I want to just admit everything in my life and I want to be a better person and I want to do all this stuff and all that is a good sentiment. But when it's all based around this kind of hyper emotional state that they've been whipped up into, I don't know that it's going to last. And for some people it does. I can tell you, based on my own personal experience, that not all of it is bad. I went to like a Christian conference and I think I was 11 or 12, maybe even 13, I can't remember. And they were talking about, it wasn't a big hype conference. It wasn't like that. But at the same time, there was this kind of hyper emotional moment. And maybe it was more for me than anything else. They were talking about writing your sins, writing a sin that you were struggling with for a long time on a piece of paper. And we were going to go out to the back and we were going to just burn it. We were going to go out there and just light it up. And for me at the time, that was last. I was really struggling with last. I was watching a lot of YouTube videos that were just sexually inappropriate and I didn't really know who to talk to. Nobody really talked about that as much. I had heard about pornography, but I'm like, is this pornography? I don't really know. Is this even wrong? I knew it was wrong, but I still didn't know what to do about it necessarily. And so I went out back with them and we burnt all our pieces of paper with all kind of our major sins on them or the sin that we were struggling with on it. And that night I went to my dad and I said, dad, I'm struggling with this. I need you to help me. And that was the beginning of a turning point in my life or at least beginning to battle against it and not just give in every time. The key here I think is we need to rely less on the hype on the emotional music and the whipping people up into this overstimulated state where they're fatigued and exhausted mentally and physically where they can just be present and allow themselves to, okay, I just need to let out everything in my life and or be present. And I'll listen to what the speaker has to say because I'm just so emotionally exhausted and overstimulated and overwhelmed and all these kinds of things. Like we need to rely way less on that because I don't think that's good at all and focus back on just preaching the true gospel to kids. Like I'm serious. Like God's word will not return void. You don't need all the fluff to make it happen. I'm not saying that you can't play cool music or loud music or whatever else but you need to be conscientious of the people that really that's a deterrent for them. That's something that's a stumbling block. That's a roadblock for them actually coming to know God or being present. I think about Paul Washer's sermon that he preached to that youth camp. Maybe it was not a youth camp, it was a youth conference. He just goes straight at the true gospel. It was no fluff. There was no entertainment or music or lights or nothing. He just got to the point and that has changed the life of so many people. God's used that to change the life of so many people. That's what I keep coming back to. And so I would just encourage you if you're in youth ministry, hey, focus on just the pure gospel. It's cool to do fun things, that's awesome. But don't lose sight of what the main thing is. Thanks for watching this video. If you enjoyed it, subscribe because I'm putting out new videos all the time. Also, if you're interested in more content, subscribe to my other channel, Men on Mission. I think you'll enjoy it. Click the link in my description to subscribe and I'll see you over there. Until next time, God bless.