Birds chirping, kids laughing and music humming in the background provided a soundtrack to the final week at Sunset Lake Camp in Wilkeson, Wash., which featured aquatics, advanced horsemanship and the Festival of the Arts program.
The Festival of the Arts is designed to encourage the musical, artistic and spiritual involvement of children. The program offers many creative outlets, from photography and drama to instrumental, vocal, bell choir, strings and music production.
The music production class is especially popular because campers help write, create, record and produce a music video. This year's music video is called "To Be Free."
Werner Carrasco, Out of Shape Productions director and owner of Werner Music, spent the week with the music production campers helping them produce and record the music video. This is the third music video the music production class has created in three years.
Carrasco wanted to give campers an experience with the professional music and video industry: how it works, the steps that happen and the idea process. He had the campers to come up with original ideas to present Christian and godly value to the rest of the campers.
“We discuss their own belief system to a deeper level to help them ‘see’ the gospel in a way that might spring up a catch phrase, a concept, a ‘hook’ that might be useful to convey a strong message,” Carrasco says. Carrasco has seen campers from his class feel challenged to revise their own concepts and to research God more profoundly and see Him in a far more personal way.
Two new Festival of the Arts classes were introduced this year: bell choir and drama. Staff interacted with campers in the bell choir, filling out their numbers to produce a musical piece for the end-of-the-week show. The drama class was filled with excited campers just waiting to get their act on.
At the end of the week, parents enjoy a showcase put on by campers and staff. “Parents were overwhelmed by what their children could do in a week,” says David Yeagley, Sunset Lake Camp director.
During that week, it wasn’t just the music moving people. A young aquatics camper came to the immediate decision she wanted to be baptized, and she needed to be baptized that very day. Camp staff called her grandmother for the family's permission, and it just so happened that she was right there on campus. Her grandmother was thrilled at the decision, and that very same day the young girl was baptized.
Yeagley recalls the girl coming up from the water after her baptism and proclaiming, “I feel like a new person!”
That young camper (along with a full summer of 720 campers) truly learned to be free in Jesus.
Campers and staff gather together for a night of worship.
Campers enjoy some recreation time before evening worship.
Art campers get their hands dirty making ceramics.
Werner Carrasco produces and directs "To Be Free" during the week of Festival of the Arts.
A young camper gets baptized during Festival of the Arts week at camp.
