As a General Rule...

Camp Idlewild is in the market to hire one male and one female paid staff worker this summer, and it as my job to put together a paid staff application form to be posted on our website and mailed to area churches. Being a true conservative at heart (meaning I wanted to conserve work), I looked at some other camp application forms to get some ideas. I was a little surprised by the rules for paid staff workers at one Bible camp. Here are some of the rules workers are to follow BEFORE being hired by the camp--

• Regularly attend all the services and special meetings of your church.
• Attend all youth functions of your church.
• Do not listen to “Christian” rock or other forms of improper music.
• Never go to movie theaters.
• Do not watch TV programs.
• High school teens should not have a boyfriend or girlfriend.
• Abide by the all the teachings of the Bible in your personal life.

These are the rules that perspective camp workers must agree to follow BEFORE being hired by the camp. Once camp starts, there is another list that adds to these!

Isn't it interesting that the last rule is "abide by all the teachings of the Bible in your personal life." Wouldn’t that one be enough to make all the other rules unnecessary? And doesn’t that last rule admit that all the other rules are something added to the teachings of the Bible? OK, I know that you need special rules when working with young people at camp. It’s perfectly permissible for Christian teens to own a pocket knife— that is not perfectly OK at camp.

I don’t believe we need to encourage our young people to watch more TV or go to more movies. Personally, I think our kids (and their parents) would be better off if they listened to more Casting Crowns or Mercy Me (or Skillet or TobyMac) rather than the music they listen to now. Having guidelines (rules) for spiritual living are good and necessary… as long as we decide to follow them ourselves (rather than having them imposed from without) and don’t use them to judge the spirituality (or lack thereof) of other people. As we’ve been seeing in the Pharisees in our reading through the gospels, the ability to have rules without abusing rules is not easy… as a general rule.