LifeChange Camp: Bill and Carol Anderson

There is a place where wild turkeys, silly songs around the campfire, and solid Bible teaching come together.

They can all be found at LifeChange Camp, located in Clinton, Missouri, and run by Samaritan Ministries members Bill and Carol Anderson. Year-round, the 80-acre camp serves retreat groups of 15 to 80 people, such as kids and teens, church leaders, work/missions teams, and even scrapbookers. Its vision is “to build and establish a quality camp and retreat facility and ministry that will meet the camping and retreat needs of supporting churches and other groups across the Midwest.”

Although founded in 2003, Bill and Carol’s vision for being a part of a Christian camp started 25 years ago. Their recognition of how important the role of summer camp can be in the hearts of children and teens stems from each of their past experiences.

Bill was raised in a Christian home, and attending summer camp played an integral part of his childhood and young adult years.

“Every year since third grade I’ve gone to summer camp. As I got older into high school, I would go not only as a camper, but as a counselor. Then during my many years of pastoring, I would go to camp every summer either as camp director or as the camp praise and worship leader,” Bill says. “Camp has just been a part of my spiritual walk.”

Carol brings a different but equally important perspective of how Christian summer camp influenced her life. She was not raised in a Christian home, but one summer her mother decided to send both Carol and her brother to a Christian camp. It was there that they both found Jesus and accepted Him as their Savior.

Eight years ago, God led Bill and Carol to work at a church in Missouri, then made 80 acres of land available to use as a camp. They founded LifeChange Foundation, Inc., purchased the land, and have been building on it ever since.

“It’s extremely motivating and extremely humbling to walk around every day and see what God’s done and that we’ve been able to be part of it,” says Bill.

The camp tithes on every dollar that comes in, whether it’s from donations, user fees, etc.—something they believe the Lord has impressed upon them from the very beginning.

“God supplies abundantly, and He blesses faithful, simple obedience,” Bill says. “He’s been faithful in how He’s supplied, and we’ve got to be faithful on our end of the deal.” (Part of that tithe money is set aside in order to respond to other members’ Special Prayer Needs that come up in the Samaritan newsletter.)

According to Bill, there are three key ingredients to being a good host: a nice place, good food, and clean restrooms. And even though there are only three year-round, full-time employees—Bill, Carol, and Reita, the kitchen assistant—God has blessed their service and has enabled the camp to offer amenities such as a rustic dining hall that seats 150, and a 120-person sleeping capacity in the camp’s cabins and bunk rooms. Bill describes the camp as “a natural setting where you’re separated away from a lot of the other distractions of life and in a Christ-concentrated experience.”

Each summer they carefully interview and hire six to eight high school and college students to be head counselors. They go through an interview process to ensure that the young men and women in these crucial positions are mature and well-grounded in the Lord, able to deal with difficult situations and give spiritual guidance. The assistant counselors, who are known as LifeSupport, are younger teens who are not old enough to be head counselors and come in on a volunteer basis one to two weeks at a time.

Bill was excited that this past summer, the seventh of LifeChange Camp, was the first summer that teens who began as young campers were old enough to come back to be a part of LifeSupport. Bill and Carol were able to witness firsthand how the decisions these teens made as campers have continued to affect their lives, and how they now desire to give back to the camp as volunteers.

On a typical summer day at LifeChange Camp, campers are taught from Scripture by guest speakers who are brought in along with a worship band. Then, after small groups, the afternoons are filled with activities such as hiking, swimming, hayrack rides, and games. In the evening, Bill usually teaches, and then a day at camp would not be complete without singing goofy camp songs around a campfire. Also during this time, the campers are able to share what the Lord is doing in their lives and the decisions they’ve made that week about their spiritual walk.

This past summer the camp built an open-air pavilion that allows daily activities to continue even when it rains. Currently, the camp is in the process of building a guest house/storm shelter. The Lord has blessed the camp with donations of every variety—financial, large gifts such as commercial kitchen equipment and a tractor, and then perhaps the most meaningful—volunteer work.

Bill has many stories of how God has provided for the camp’s needs. Around the time that they wanted to launch the building project for the pavilion, a group that was visiting heard about the building plans and said, “We can do that—it’s a big barn-raising project!” a valuable skill that stems from the group’s Mennonite heritage. The group owns a steel construction company and many other resources, which enabled LifeChange Camp to receive great deals on all aspects of the project. After the pavilion was built, a friend handed Bill a large check to cover the remaining costs.

Camps like LifeChange Camp are an important part of Christian ministry. Camp allows children and teens to escape from the distractions of the media-driven, indoor world in which we live and immerse themselves in an atmosphere of team-building, adventure, and, most importantly, solid Biblical teaching. Likewise, it offers servants in ministry an opportunity to “clear the cobwebs,” as Bill puts it, by retreating to a quiet place—whether it’s for several days or just for an evening or two as they’re traveling through.