What a last-minute favor in the Irish countryside taught me about the church that grew out of this very camp.
I hadn’t been part of this camp in a couple of years. The American team that was supposed to run this week’s sessions had to pull out — not exactly last-minute, but close enough that finding a replacement wasn’t easy. So the organizers called around to people who used to help, and I was one of them. Now I’m back in an eighteenth-century mansion in the Irish countryside, short on sleep, roasting something over a fire with a circle of eight-year-olds, and genuinely glad to be here.
Family camp is exactly what it sounds like: a full week, Sunday to Saturday, for every age at once. School-age kids, teenagers, young adults, parents, grandparents — 77 of us this week, helpers included. Mornings start with songs and a Bible story. Afternoons we head off-site. Evenings, we break into groups by age and talk through what we heard that morning. It’s loud, it takes a lot of energy, and it’s been happening in one form or another for decades, ever since an urban outreach ministry started investing in communities around Dublin long before I ever arrived.
What’s struck me most this week isn’t the schedule, though. It’s who’s actually running things. The camp now belongs to Family Fellowship, a church that didn’t exist five years ago. It was planted in 2021 by people who’d first heard the gospel through this same ministry, years earlier — people who decided, together, it was time to start something of their own. Watching that congregation fill a room with families who found their way here through the community it’s built, I keep thinking: this is the story, more than any single week I helped run.
This week’s camp is directed by a woman who’s been coming since she was a child but didn’t come to faith herself until her thirties. Ireland moves at that pace. Trust here is relational, not transactional, and it’s earned over years, not a single visit. I’ve learned not to treat that as a hurdle — it’s exactly how change that lasts actually happens.
I’m just one of a small team helping out this week, mostly with music, driving the minibus, helping with one of the small groups when asked, and otherwise staying out of the way. That feels like the right place to be. If you’d like to help Dorine and me keep showing up in Dublin — not to lead, but to walk alongside the leaders who are already doing this, click the button below.
