Teen evangelists on the move: next stop Iraq

[Pastor Dale Morgan]

Perilous Times

Teen evangelists on the move: next stop Iraq

In the scorching wilds of Florida, children as young as nine are learning to mix cement, swim treacherous waters and – most importantly – spread Christianity around the world. Next stop for these would-be missionaries: Iraq
 

By Alex Hannaford
Published: 3:27PM BST 28 Sep 2010

Praying at Teen Mission International, Florida.


It’s just after 6am and the sun is not yet up. Two hundred children stand in a clearing, surrounded by a dense jungle of palm trees on an island off the Florida coast. A girl of about 15 climbs a stepladder in the middle of the group and everyone bows their heads. 'We pray the Lord will keep us safe today,’ she says.

The children divide into smaller groups and disappear into the forest where, one at a time, they embark on an army-style obstacle course that involves crawling through painted steel tunnels, scrambling over a 20ft mountain of tyres, climbing over huge wooden walls emblazoned with the words 'doubt’, 'anxiety’ and 'confusion’, and then attempting to put large wooden boxes, painted with the books of the Bible, in chronological order.
 

'Judges, Ruth, where’s 2nd Chronicles?’ shouts a staff member named Linda Maher. 'Psalms. Ecclesiastes!’

This is Teen Missions International, affectionately known as 'The Lord’s Boot Camp’, a sprawling 250-acre slice of jungle on Merritt Island, 45 minutes east of Orlando. Each summer, hundreds of children between the ages of four and 18 descend on this place to sleep in tents, wash themselves and their clothes in muddy lake water (there is no running water or electricity), endure swarms of bloodthirsty mosquitoes, tackle obstacle courses, and – most importantly – learn to evangelise.

Once boot camp is over, the children are flown to far-flung corners of the globe to begin their work as Christian missionaries where they will help build schools and churches, and attempt to convert the people who live there. 'This is not pamper camp,’ Teen Missions’ 82-year-old founder Bob Bland once told an American television crew. 'If you’re looking for pamper camp, that’s down the road.’

Bland set up Teen Missions 40 years ago and in that time 40,000 youngsters have come through here. At the end of this week, the teams will head to places like the Amazon rainforest, Belize, Uganda and Malawi to begin evangelising, work with Aids orphans or expand existing mission buildings.

Eighty million Americans identify themselves as Evangelical Christians, making them the largest religious group in the United States, and while some say missionaries have been a force for good, providing much-needed medical care and education as well as championing the rights of indigenous people, others say the spread of Christianity reeks of colonialism and has obliterated native traditions. But that hasn’t stopped the Teenvangelists – this new breed of young, passionate American bent on spreading their old-time religion.

Bland is unapologetic about the potentially thorny issue of trying to convert people. Evangelism is the underpinning of everything that happens at Teen Missions, although he says there is more than one way to preach the gospel: it’s not just bible thumping, he insists. 'They show by example; by helping people.’

Occasionally, though, spreading the word can be met with hostility: at one of the first boot camps in Indonesia, Bland says the team had rocks thrown at them. 'Some people are anti-whatever,’ he says. 'But now we are operating six Bible schools there, so in time they see you’re real and doing something good. You can’t force anyone to be anything.’

Bland and his team will certainly have their work cut out for them next year, when they plan to visit what could be their most hostile country yet: Iraq.

Back at boot camp, a group is attempting to cross the Slough – a stagnant man-made swamp. 'Praise the Lord,’ one boy yells as he swings across and emerges, wet and muddy, from the smelly water. A girl, Ashley, looks apprehensive as she gets to the edge, grabs hold of the rope and swings but slips, emerging a second later from the water, crying.

'Whoa, you walked across the water,’ another boy yells to his friend as he makes it across.

The Lord’s Boot Camp is nothing if not authentic: on more than one occasion I’m told that if the children can survive this they can survive anything the developing world can throw at them. It’s hot (a scorching 97F/36C while I’m there), humid and a 13ft alligator was removed from the lake that doubles as the children’s swimming pool last summer (there are rumours that smaller ones still lurk under the water). The snapping turtles, however, are still very much there.

Home for the two weeks they’re here is in tents, pitched on wooden pallets and covered with pegged-down sheets of black tarpaulin. There are makeshift washing lines suspended between trees and each child is issued with a five-gallon bucket to collect lake water to flush the lavatories, clean their clothes and themselves.

Teams are given points each day depending on how clean their camp site is: the group that wins the most gets to swim in a bona fide swimming pool (not the lake). Those that lose have to wear placards that say 'I live like a pig’ around their necks and clean the lavatories.

The main gathering area is a huge 'big top’ tent where rallies are held each evening, at which the children sing, pray and listen to sermons. Overlooking that is the 30ft-high prayer tower, which looks not unlike a prison watchtower. Here, for 12 hours each day, children spend one-hour shifts sitting in the top, praying over photos of their fellow missionaries.

Nearby, a group of younger children wearing pyjama bottoms, hard hats and work boots are learning to mix concrete in a clearing among the palms. One of the girls in the group, May Wadman, is just nine years old. She is tiny, wears thick-lensed glasses and her hair sticks to her face with sweat. She has never been out of the US before and tells me she’s excited about going to Malawi.

Her friend, Elena Demos, an 11 year-old from West Springfield, Massachusetts, went there last year. 'We planted fruit and vegetables for the kids at the orphanage, hung out with street children and taught them stories from the Bible,’ she says. 'We made their day.’

Teen Missions estimates that scores of its campers have gone on to become full-time missionaries or work for the church in some capacity.

The main purpose of boot camp, though, is to learn evangelism techniques to employ in the field. Classes take place daily in an office building near the estate entrance. It’s seen better days – there are damp brown patches on the ceiling and peeling paper on the walls. It is, however, the only chance during camp that the children get a break from the intense heat.

Before they begin, a girl leads the group in prayer. 'Please Lord, help us turn the world more Christian,’ she says, before they pair off and practise evangelising.

Sixteen-year-old John Givens says his tactic is usually to sit down and talk to someone as if he’s getting to know them. 'We’re taught to ask big questions,’ he says, 'like: “Do you think you’re a good person?” Then you say: “Good people can’t get into heaven.”’

According to Teen Missions, they’re not good enough.

'I then pull the Ten Commandments on them,’ continues John. 'I tell them that if they tell a lie it’s the same thing as murder in God’s eyes.’

The instructor asks the class if it’s getting easier to articulate their faith. 'Are you fumbling for the right words or the right verses?’ he says. 'Just remember, the best philanthropist in the world doesn’t qualify for eternal life. That includes Gandhi and, what’s her name, Mother Teresa. Not good enough.’ Wow. What chance do the rest of us have?

John, from New Jersey, is the youngest of five children and grew up in a large Christian family. He tells me he’s finding the camp tough. 'It’s physically and mentally challenging. The first few days were awful. I’m a clean person but I haven’t taken a bath for two weeks. It’s hot and humid. I barely get any sleep – I have to lie on my shirt or I’ll stick to my mattress. We bathe with a bucket of lake water – I have found dead fish in my clothes. But it’s a personal challenge and I will finish it,’ he says.

I ask whether he’d send his children here in future. 'If they were p---ing me off,’ he says, laughing.

Amber Tuttle admits Teen Missions isn’t for everyone. Together with her husband, Brian, Tuttle – a pretty woman in her mid-thirties – is leading a group to Peru. 'There may be some here who say they’ll never come back, that’s fine,’ she says. 'It may be a one-time experience, but for some it changes the course of their life.’

Tuttle first heard about Teen Missions in a Christian radio broadcast when she was 11. Three years later she went on her first camp – to Mexico’s Yucatan peninsula. 'Two miles from where we were staying was poverty like I’d never seen,’ she says. 'The church was literally made of twigs and cardboard, and we tore it down and built a concrete block church.’

Tuttle met Brian on another mission trip – to Canada – in 1990, they married and now have three children: Wes, 15, Seth, 13 and Emily, 11. In 2008, the couple decided they wanted to become full-time missionaries. They sold their home and moved into a trailer down the road from the base on Merritt Island, and asked family, friends and their local church to sponsor them. They receive around $2,000 a month to live on.

'We’ll see where the Lord leads us,’ Tuttle says. 'It was hard for Brian as the man. He had a good job, we were out of debt, we had a nice little home, a car, and it was hard to let go of that.’

Bob Bland can be seen most days during boot camp, riding around on his old bicycle. Dressed in a purple polo shirt and jeans, he is tanned, has smartly combed white hair and speaks with a strong Southern drawl. He also looks a lot younger than his 82 years.

Born in Ohio into a farming family, he initially trained as a plumber and carpenter before deciding to go to Bible college. He then worked at a youth ministry for six years, came up with the idea for Teen Missions and bought some land bordering Nasa's Cape Canaveral space centre from the Girl Scouts organisation.

'We didn’t have boot camp to begin with,’ Bland explains. 'We just took ’em into the field. But then the Peru trip happened and everything that could go wrong went wrong.’

'Peru’ has become legend at Teen Missions. Bland says the trip there in the early Seventies was a disaster that involved, among other things, rebellious campers, cancelled flights, getting stuck in the Amazon, near-drownings and deadly snakes. 'Kids could have lost their lives on that trip,’ he tells me. 'So many bad things happened. We needed some training and discipline.’

I ask Bland whether some of the children are really cut out for mixing cement and building schools – especially the younger ones like nine-year-old May, who I’d met earlier, or Elena, whose shovel was taller than she was. But when it comes to Teen Missions, I quickly discover Bland is particularly evangelistic.

'At boot camp we unplug ’em,’ he says. 'There’s so much noise in their lives they can’t hear anything. They got so much junk – iPods and they’re texting and… here it’s all gone. You smuggle a Pepsi in here, you can sell it for 50 bucks on the spot. A lot of kids grow up at boot camp.’

One major criticism levelled at short-term mission trips – let alone ones that involve children as young as nine – is that they really don’t make much impact in the places they go; that the trips are designed to help the missionaries, not the people native to those countries.

Take the Haiti trip next summer, for example. The promotional blurb reads: 'Looking for an unforgettable missions trip in one of the poorest countries in the world?’ That project involves working on a church building and clearing rubble from the pastor’s house.

Bland admits that although they do build schools, churches and orphanages, the main work of Teen Missions is to change the lives of the children that are going on these trips. 'In our leader training seminar, the first thing we tell them is we’re building kids, not buildings,’ he says.

'Are they helping? Yeah, they’re helping, but who are they helping? Are they helping the people there? No, not very much… If it’s a two-week deal it’s pretty much a touristy thing because you’ve got to see the sights and by the time you do that you’re gone. But it does help get them to see there’s another world they’ve never been to, especially if it’s a Third World country. They don’t forget that.’

What about the conflict between the spread of Christianity and local cultures? 'The missionary Marilyn Laszlo, a big name in Christian circles, was just here giving a talk to the kids,’ Bland says. 'She was along the Sepik river in New Guinea and the people there were burying people alive. Are we changing that culture? Yeah – you better believe it.’

I’d earlier asked a group of girls heading to Samoa if they knew much about the island. 'We’re not told much about the countries we go to unless we research it ourselves,’ they said.

Soon, Bland is flying to Iraqi Kurdistan to lay the foundations for a mission trip there next June. The person leading that expedition will be Margaret Watsa, a Canadian who used to teach in England. She’ll be teaching phonetics. 'God has made it very clear to me there is a plan and that I’m part of that plan,’ Watsa tells me. 'I think if I’m supposed to be doing this, he’ll either protect me from harm or it’s his plan that something should happen… I believe my life is in God’s hands.’ Two children have already signed up for the Iraq trip, but Bland says he won’t decide whether it’ll go ahead until he gets back from his recce.

The final evening at boot camp, before the teams fly off to their respective countries to begin the Lord’s work, is known as Commissioning Night. During the day there has been hammering, the clunking of metal and the roar of tractor engines as the children and their team leaders help take down their tents and dismantle the camp.

Several weeks’ worth of dust and forest debris is blown and swept from paths, and teams march around the site carrying buckets, shovels and bags. 'One more day, one more day,’ they shout as they gather in the big top for the final ceremony.

Just outside the marquee, the forest is alive with the shrill hum of crickets. Standing by the obstacle course, kicking dirt up against the 30ft-high boards that, earlier in the week, hundreds of children had leapt over at an ungodly hour, are two boys: Peter Vance, 16, from Massachusetts, and his new friend Austin Carver, 15, from Pennsylvania, are flying to Madagascar in the morning.

Neither of them has enjoyed his time here. Peter says his parents gave him an ultimatum: stay at state school and come to Teen Missions for the summer, or go to a tiny Christian school in the autumn. Teen Missions was the lesser of two evils. 'I grew up as a missionary kid in Uzbekistan for 14 years,’ he says. 'This isn’t such a bad place but the worst thing is not having any technology. I miss my iPod, logging on to Facebook, my Xbox. I miss playing and watching sports.’

Austin is less diplomatic. 'They try to force Jesus on you in every physical way,’ he says. 'We go to church every single day but they only call it church on Sunday. I won’t come back. I want to form a band – I play bass. The music sucks here. My parents paid $5,000 for me to do this.

'Dude, if Pete wasn’t here I don’t know what I’d have done – you’d have seen me hanging from the prayer tower.’