RMCNews – Loveland, Colorado … The Front Range Camp Meeting kicked off the 2024 Rocky Mountain Conference (RMC) camp meeting season at Campion Academy in Loveland, Colorado, May 31-June 1. This year’s camp meeting theme was “Reaching the Unreached,” exploring the importance of discipleship.
On May 31, the evening program began with small group prayer, and Leandro Bizama, associate pastor of Worship and Evangelism at Campion Seventh-day Adventist Church, led the praise team with his original score “I Will Sing of Jesus Love for Me” and other song selections.
Rodlie Ortiz, lead pastor at Campion Church, then introduced the camp meeting’s keynote speaker, Laurence Burn. Burn has a pastoral history in the Seventh-day Adventist Church and is currently the training director with Adventist Frontier Missions where he facilitates the training and development of all missionaries prior to launch and during their time in the mission field.
Burn’s passionate and witty approach to presenting and training was evident early on in his evening program as he stated, “I am probably going to offend you … There is a time for us to be nurtured, but there is also a time to be stirred up … There is a lot of work to be done, and it can’t get done unless everyone is all in!”
This led into his discussion on the Biblical origins and design purpose of humankind. “Discipleship is closest to God’s original purpose for us,” Burn remarked. He urged the Adventist Church, as a whole, to shift focus from the number of baptisms to the number of disciples made: “[the Church should] stop measuring baptisms in water and start measuring by disciples in the Church. If you have been baptized but never made a disciple, you are not fulfilling the Great Commission.”
The camp meeting continued on June 1 with a Sabbath School program and worship service. The attendee count surged to several hundred people during the worship service, where Burn delivered the message for the service, expanding on Christians’ role in God’s mission.
The camp meeting closed with an evening program. Burn’s final message for the camp meeting at this program gave practical steps and tips to making disciples. He reminded attendees that discipleship starts in the home and local community, and that not every disciple may travel far distances to “fulfill God’s original purpose.”
Mic Thurber, RMC president, Doug Inglish, RMC vice president for administration, and Mikey Mallory, RMC Ministerial director attended to camp to serve in various capacities.
The camp meeting also featured a number of music performances during the programs, including Campion Academy student performers and local choirs and quartets. Remarks could be heard in the crowd on the quality of the music selections and performers.
Grant Riley, camp attendee and member of the Fort Collins Church, has attended the northeast Colorado regional camp meeting the past 13 years. When asked what has made him return to the camp meeting for so many years, he commented, “[It is] seeing people I haven’t gotten to see in quite a long time. And there’s a lot of really cool history in this place. We were walking through the hallways of the administrative building, and I saw the HMS Richards graduates’ pictures. I hadn’t seen that before. 1914, I think it was. That was cool.”
While Riley may be a long-time attendee of the camp meeting, this was the first camp meeting for Pastor Ortiz in his new role at Campion Church. “My hope for the camp meeting was to be challenged and inspired missionaly. For us to think outside of our normal routines, our normal context, and just to be given a perspective of something that we don’t normally experience.”
“So, my personal response now is huddling back with our team and what would it look like for us to take discipleship seriously,” concluded Ortiz. “I’m super excited about everything we experienced, and I’m just praying that that people receive it as Spirit and respond to it.”
The next RMC camp meeting will be held at the Canon City Seventh-day Adventist Church, June 28-30, followed by the Cowboy Camp Meeting held in the Uncompahgre National Forest, Colorado, July 10-14. Wyoming’s camp meeting in Casper, Wyoming, is July 16-20, and the Western Slope Camp Meeting will convene August 21-25. The camp meeting season will close with the Hispanic Camp Meeting, August 31-September 1.
—RMCNews. Photos by Liz Kirkland.
