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Eric and Amy in the camp office

Camp Shalom: Raising Kids in Faith

Gaze out the solitary window of the Davenport office of Camp Shalom on the second floor of the St. Paul building. Dream north beyond Vander Veer Park. Then, travel in your imagination on Brady Street. Pass by city dwellings and stores, into the open countryside on Highway 61, past Eldridge and DeWitt, skirting around Maquoketa and into the Jackson County hills. Hang a left toward the Maquoketa Caves State Park. At the Camp Shalom sign, take a winding gravel road into this 311-acre gem of God’s creation.

Blink. You’re in a place of natural wonder that breathes with the rhythm of God’s Spirit.

“Camp Shalom is an amazingly diverse natural environment of field and prairie, hills and woods, wetlands and meadows,” says Pastor Eric Elkin, now in his ninth year as Camp Shalom’s executive director. “You have a sense of being in the wilderness but just 45 minutes from the Quad Cities.”

Back in Davenport, Amy Koehler, camp administrative assistant, and Eric oversee all the details for summer registration and off-season retreating. Their bright office is a former St. Paul classroom. It’s just the right space and place for managing a camp that’s firmly planted in a Quad-City base.

Launched in 1976 by St. Paul congregation, Camp Shalom grew into its early adolescence as a ministry of this church. Volunteers constructed cabins, blazed trails, cooked meals. Now Camp Shalom is an independently-operated ecumenical organization. But our enduring church-camp friendship means that we share a roof in Davenport and a God-inspired love for raising kids in faithful ways.

You can measure this ministry in numbers, if you like. But behind the statistics are extraordinary stories of kids experiencing faith in God’s creation.

The September-May retreat business with school and church groups has nearly quadrupled in five years. Some 1,100 campers and families are expected this summer. Campers are now 40% Catholic and 40% Lutheran, creating a strong ecumenical bridge.

Kids and families are receiving “campership” financial help to the tune of $21,000. This summer, 10 Madison Elementary kids and another 10 J.B. Young middle-schoolers will enroll on camperships that pay all but $25 of their costs.

On May 1, a busload of Madison 2nd-graders will connect happily with trees, wetlands, and bugs on a field trip. “Kids are really big on bugs,” laughs Eric, who is working to grow the camp’s environmental curriculum.

An information-packed website has transformed spring dramatically for Amy Koehler. Registration time used to mean over three weeks of intense paper-shuffling, mailings, and hair-pulling frustration as she enrolled kids into camp weeks.

Now online registration and email confirmations mean freedom from this tedium, and greater availability for people. Amy responds patiently to overwrought parents with calm, clear information. (“The kids are ready for camp,” says Amy. “Sometimes the parents aren’t.”) She handles requests for financial help with kindness. She manages an increasingly sophisticated donor database. She posts daily web updates that show which summer weeks still have room for campers.

Says Eric, the world of camp ministry is changing. Balanced year-round school calendars squeeze the summer window for camp and other programs. Eric spends a lot of time making his voice heard in the culture: “Camps have a place in the collective raising of children.”

A campfire under a night sky. Teamwork on the climbing wall. Exploring the river bluffs. “There’s no better way to connect a kid with a faith life,” says Eric. Not only that, when kids go to Camp Shalom with school friends, faith talk makes its way more naturally into daily school life. Independence and strength grow.

A parent himself, Eric knows that when Friday comes and kids say tearful goodbyes to new friends and counselors, “they love coming back home. On that car ride home, that’s when kids start talking about faith.”
To learn more about this dynamic partner in ministry>>

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"Thou hast given so much to me, Give one thing more, - a grateful heart;" ~George Herbert