Here I am
About this blog
Brian Frick is the Associate for Camp and Conferences Ministries with the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.). He has been involved in camp and conference ministry since high school. For the past ten years, Brian has served as program director of Johnsonburg Center in New Jersey, Westminster Woods in California, and Heartland Center in Missouri.
Camp and conference ministry compliments and partners with other ministry aspects of our church to foster faith development and reflection. As our communities and our church changes, our ministries need to grow and adapt with creative and emergent programming and leadership to meet new realities.
These blogs entries, though varied, are intended to spur thought and conversation around the opportunities and challenges before us.
Recent posts
- Letters from Camp
- Step up to support reconciliation
- Does your Ministry Transform Young Adults?
- Camp Curriculum Discount Available
- Earth Day Resources from the National Council of Churches
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Incorporating Change as the “new reality” (For a Time Such as This - Part 3 )
“Be the change you want to see in the
world,
So we’ve talked about and I hope you have thought about the changes you are experiencing. More will come! But looking at what you know and what you have experienced, which of these changes have you accepted, and now – what do you do with them? How does your world view, your actions, your vocation, you calling, and your living respond to and incorporate the changes around you?
I think one of the most healthy things we can do personally, is to go through a process of assessing and then incorporating changing perceptions into our being. Most recently, I took a personal journey to revisit the childhood trauma of my father dying when I was seven. After guided and careful reflection of the experience and how it has shaped my world view and personality, I have come to accept it and come to embrace the changes in my life since then. Up until this deep introspection, my father's sudden death was the framework from which I related to the world. After revealing to myself the changes I had ignored and fought, I can now relate to the world in a different way. It took an intentional action on my part, and now takes an intentional incorporation of what I have learned, named, and accepted into a new way of being. It has helped me become more fully engaged.
On a calling, ministry level – I feel passionately that we are or need to be involved in incorporating who we have been, into who we are becoming. As a friend of mine, Warren Cooper told me recently, “we need to find a way to honor the past as ‘good’ and take that into forming an new and different future that is alive. If we live in and try to recreate the past, we are living in something that is gone, that is dead.”
How are you honoring and accepting who you are and where you have been in your ministry? How is that ‘good?’ How does that inform our future? Are you struggling to regain the past? How does forming a new future in a ‘new normal’ bring new life to your ministry? Can you do that in a way that does not abandon your rich past?
April 7, 2011
Accepting Changes (For a Time Such as This -Part 2)
Now that we have lived with and identified the changes that we see and feel currently, how are we accepting them? Throughout history, those who are reactionary, who try to reclaim the “calm and normal” of the past, have been...- Posted at 12:53 p.m.
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April 6, 2011
Fair Purchasing - Putting Faith into Action
God has clearly called us to be Stewards of God's creation. What better classroom to teach that in than our camp and conference centers? When people see that our actions reflect our words, it is easier to replicate them in...- Posted at 11:45 a.m.
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April 6, 2011
Identifying and Naming Changes (For a Time Such as This - Part 1)
Rapid, deep and impactful - change is all around us. The economy is in disarray. Or maybe a better way to say that is our economy is reflecting the upheaval of change and finding it’s way to a new normal...- Posted at 12:46 a.m.
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March 31, 2011
For a Time Such as This...Series on Transformational Changes
More than the title for the 2010 Triennium (give credit where credit is due, see banner below.) It contains subtle question of "what do we need/do or are called to be in A Time Such As This? Things are changing....- Posted at 12:38 p.m.
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