Then once a year, another spacious place appeared on the landscape of my summer as our family packed up the caravan to head 20 miles down the road to the Malvern Hills. Specifically the Three Counties Showground, which for one week a year became home to Good News Crusade Bible camp. We had been attending this annually since I was five, along with most of our church congregation, and the Jepsons were stalwarts; part of the Good News Crusade scene. Mum and Dad were camp counsellors and everyone knew Alastair from his appearances on main stage with his junior-sized guitar accompanying the band.
As a family we were definitely part of the Church of England but for this week in the year you might doubt it. If you had peeked into the Severn Barn where the evening meetings took place you wouldn’t have recognized us as a church at all. Under the bright warmth of industrial lights, you would have seen a throng of three, maybe four thousand people dancing up and down between the rows of plastic chairs, faces upturned, eyes closed as a band led them through chorus after chorus of songs. And, as the sound of thousands of voices Lifting the Name of Jesus chorused through the air, you would have seen many arms lifted high too, hands outspread, holding up the words so that God might be assured of this devotion.
You would have felt how the music enveloped us, its joyful melodies shutting out all else, as it erupted across the twilight. Swelling throughout the lower slopes of the Malvern Hills, the rhythm of its muffled beat knocking like the presence of an unwanted visitor on the homes of residents nearby. Then, later, you would have watched us go back to our circles of tents and gather round the huge thermos of hot chocolate where we would pray under the night sky that our praises would win the hearts of those who’d heard us, for Jesus.
Good News Crusade was not church but if it had been I would have been there every day. It was a week of full-on preaching, teaching, praise, worship and fellowship, which was church-speak for hanging out with your pals sharing stories about how good God is. In the afternoons there was a lot of fellowship as people gathered their camping chairs around the space in front of our open caravan awning. Tea was brewed, guitars lazily strummed, children crawled around begging grown-ups for a game of swingball and thoughts on the previous evening’s talk were shared. These pow-wows often led to a time of prayer as people testified to how their lives had been changed by what God was doing. This was really what they all came to camp for: to do business with God. The songs, the sermons, the altar calls, the hot chocolate and fellowship were all about encouraging each other to tune in and listen up and get down to soul business. What that business might be depended on where you were with the Lord.
As a child it turns out that there isn’t much business to be done with God beyond committing your life to him. So at the age of five, in Glories, the children’s meeting, I had repeated the words of the prayer and had taken my first step towards business with God.
“Dear Jesus, I know that you love me. Thank you that you died on the cross to save me. I’m sorry for the things I’ve done wrong and I ask you to forgive me and come and live in my heart forever. Amen.”
My mum wrote the date in the front of my Bible and later on, in years to come, I would almost feel her ticked-box relief as she documented this score. One child saved, two to go. And I was saved. I grew up bilingual, fluent in the religious jargon of these spirit-filled Christians who saw themselves as living water to be poured over the dry, intellectual liberalism that they said the Church of England had become. I grew up knowing that we were Real Christians, not mere churchgoers concerned with superficial stuff like priestly robes and incense.
But it wasn’t this that I’d been saved from. It was the social desolation of the other 51 weeks of the year where my face curbed inclusion in the crowd and my parents’ rules curbed exposure to sin.
The pursuit of holiness cultivates a kind of loneliness that leaves you, to the relief of anxious Christian parents, running for the safety of other Christian kids. So that week at camp saves me from social death because in that one week I remember that I’m not alone. I find friends who also know what it feels like to be not invited to a movie-sleepover because we won’t be allowed to watch the 15 certificate film, and whose classmates soon learn that Sunday is a Family Day so we won’t be allowed to go over and hang out and watch TV. At camp I expand into the spaciousness of a place where I belong and am known, a place that operates on a system of belonging that I can navigate.
My friends here completely get it when I tell them how Rosalind and I were banned from attending a visiting theatre company’s play at the end of term because it featured a wizard. We sprawl on the grass and they laugh as I describe with despair how my sister and I sat in an empty classroom doing extra maths, along with an excluded boy who was withdrawn from the show as a punishment. This is what it means to be set apart for Jesus: sometimes it feels like a punishment.
That’s what Peter Cabot, the children’s pastor, tells us in our morning meetings when he talks to us about Jesus’ warning that the world will persecute us and hate us because we follow him. And though the narrow path eventually leads to life in all its fullness it seems that the path itself is pretty lonely and hateful. But at least it’s wide enough to accommodate my gang of friends: Charlie Fox and his sister Katie, and Hannah, Julia and Joel.
If Harry Potter had been published whilst I was a child I would have begged to be home-schooled: a playground full of Hogwarts chatter and fantasy quidditch would have been unbearable. Wizardry and witchcraft were up there with horoscopes and crystals in occult dabbling that was forbidden to us – except, that is, when we got hold of the autobiography of a former witch, telling the story of her conversion to Christianity. None of our parents worried when we got hold of From Witchcraft to Christ from the camp bookshop and pored over its details about covens and black magic. When Joel told us that his mum was a friend of the author, we pestered him for details about what she was like: Did she still have the look of a witch about her? Did she still carry the evil scars of this former life? We were captivated, not just because it was sensationalist but because it was sensational and real. There were rumours that covens of witches met in the hills above our campsite and Charlie insisted that he’d tagged along on a midnight walk with some of the youth team where they had stumbled on the burnt remnants of an animal skull. Unequivocal signs of occult activity, we all agreed, shivering in the grip of these spooky tales.
In short, witches who tell their testimony about a pre-Christian life spent stirring cauldrons were fine. Wizards in theatre were a complete no-go. Doing business with God was our main goal, but dealing with pesky Satan on the side was something we couldn’t afford to trivialize. We had joined God’s holy army and our fight was not against flesh and blood but against the rulers, authorities and powers of spiritual forces in the heavenly realms. Which was why, when my cousin’s Hollywood success catapulted her into movie-stardom in Ghostbusters and the girls in my class stuck pictures of her inside their exercise books, Rosalind and I were banned from watching her rise to fame as the demon-possessed Dana. Demonic activity was not to be taken lightly and messed around with by Hollywood or anyone else. Sneaking cuttings from magazines into my books, I would read articles and interviews with her and wonder if she had come through the whole film-making process unscathed.
* * *
Then, at the age of twelve, I was accidentally initiated into the realities of such supernatural battles. It was the Thursday afternoon of camp; I was by myself and possibly twitching for something with which to impress Charlie Fox, and so I headed into the Big Top youth meeting. You were meant to be sixteen or over to attend these meetings but I wandered in unchallenged and slipped into a seat at the end of a row.
When we were five, in Glories, the children’s activities were all about love and singing songs that reminded us how we have a wonderful friend in Jesus. At eight we joined Salt Pot, and learned that Jesus calls us to be like salt in a world where people don’t know him.
At sixteen, in the Youth Tent, the emphasis changed: to sex.
Not having it but saving it – for your future husband or wife.
I probably knew this would be the topic when I meandered into the Big Top, and maybe I was hoping to glean enough juice from this grey-haired preacher man’s sex talk to silence Charlie’s boasts about his brush with a satanic coven on the hills. But at twelve years old, and in no danger of having sex with anyone, this meeting was way past my pay grade.
As the preacher man began to draw his talk to a close he signalled to the band to play something gently while he invited people to come forward and respond to his altar call. Eyes were closed, praise songs sung, hands opened and people began to wait for the Holy Spirit to prompt them to take the brave steps out of their seat and walk up to the front where someone would be waiting to pray for them.
From behind the strands of hair I had pulled forward to twiddle with, I peeked out at the teenagers beginning, one by one, to get up and make their way to the grassy space near where preacher man was now getting specific.
“And you know that you have strayed from what God wants for your life … you’ve compromised your relationship with Him, you’ve given in to lust and sexual temptation …”
I listened up.
The band were still softly strumming.
“You know you need to confess and be made clean; you know God wants to restore you to a right relationship with Him …”
I spied Alice, a girl from church sheepishly making her way towards the gathering crowd beneath the preacher’s lectern, her shoulders hunched over in embarrassment.
And then, from somewhere among the bowed teenagers and prayer counsellors, a shriek cut across the preacher man’s spiel. In wide-eyed alarm I scrutinized the faces of the band on stage; nobody seemed to show any reaction and yet the lingering cry had definitely come from up at the front somewhere.
Then again, a wail followed by a wild scream, as if someone was watching their friend being stabbed to death before their eyes.
Now I was on my feet. And preacher man was about to jump in too. The scream had come from the crowd; I could see the knot of people shuffle to make a clearing for whoever was in distress, and now preacher man was making his way into the fray. I didn’t even realize that the young woman next to me was pregnant when I jumped onto her knee flinging my arms around her neck, sobbing with the terrified realization that this was the sound of a demon being exorcised.
On reflection, maybe if I had seen Ghostbusters – The Exorcist, even – I would have been much more prepared for the experience and better able to handle it with aplomb. But in my undignified hysteria I remained clinging while the woman and her husband tried to persuade me everything was OK.
It really wasn’t OK.
Apart from finding myself in a scene from a horror film, I was about to be spotted by a teenager from church. Hayley hauled me off the pregnant woman and ushered me past the prayer ministry area out of the Big Top. I just glimpsed the writhing girl on the grass before I was led out of a side exit and marched, still sobbing, back to my parents’ caravan. I wondered what their take on the situation would be.
Thankfully there was no time of fellowship going on – most folk were trying to round up their children for tea, and Mum was busy making supper inside the caravan. But, once Hayley had explained to Mum what had happened, handing me over to her with the words “I think she’s just too young to handle that kind of prayer ministry”, Mum decided this was a two-parent situation and sent me off to get Dad from the unit leader’s caravan where he was squeezing in the pre-evening prayer meeting with the other counsellors. Now they were actually going to have a situation to counsel.
A caravan with five people in it is a pretty squashed place. A caravan with one child insisting he bring his guitar to the small formica table, an eight-year-old who would rather be eating with her friend in the caravan next door, an inconsolable twelve-year-old and two parents with supper to prepare and a psycho-theological horror scene to assuage is squashed, explosive and messy. I expected, as was usually the case, to be in a whole heap of trouble. I shouldn’t have strayed beyond Power Pack. Except that was clearly the least helpful thing to be addressing at this point. They would get to that. In the meantime, baked beans were splashing down Alastair’s guitar and Rosalind’s friends had come to call for her, and I was declaring I wouldn’t be leaving the caravan again for the rest of the week.
So in their wisdom Mum and Dad decided to let the sobs and sniffles subside and the caravan empty of at least some children before reaching for their Bibles and turning to a story in Luke’s Gospel.
As Jesus stepped ashore, he was met by a man from the town who had demons in him. For a long time this man had gone without clothes and would not stay at home, but spent his time in the burial caves. When he saw Jesus, he gave a loud cry, threw himself down at his feet and shouted, “Jesus, Son of the Most High God! What do you want with me? I beg you, don’t punish me!” He said this because Jesus had ordered the evil spirit to go out of him… Jesus asked him, “What is your name?”
“My name is ‘Mob,’” he answered – because many demons had gone into him. The demons begged Jesus not to send them into the abyss.
There was a large herd of pigs near by, feeding on a hillside. So the demons begged Jesus to let them go into the pigs and he let them. They went out of the man into the pigs. The whole herd rushed down the side of the cliff into the lake and drowned.”1
This story wasn’t often used for our Sunday school lessons but I was familiar enough with it to be perplexed by the fate of the pigs. On a purely fiscal level it was pretty unfair on the owner of the herd who lost his livelihood in one dramatic stampede off the side of a cliff. And what about the poor pigs themselves, spending their last moments housing a mob of demons before being driven out of control and down to a watery end? And then what did the demons do? Come up for air and start looking for a new repository? It all seemed as if Jesus had gone for rather a short-term solution.
But given the trouble I was in these things seemed like an unnecessary diversion and so I listened quietly to what Dad was saying.
“Darling, I know that what you heard was unpleasant, that it was all very dramatic and startling, but you mustn’t focus on that …”
Mum broke in, “Remember we mustn’t give Satan the glory by focusing on the noises and drama.”
“But how could I not focus on it? It was terrible …”
“Then think of that noise as the sound of freedom”, Dad offered a little more brightly.
“Think of the release that that girl is going to be feeling now she’s been set free and healed …”
Which was all fine, but the unutterable question going round my mind now was what on earth a teenager could have possibly done to land that kind of demonic force in her life in the first place. And not just any teenager: a teenager who comes to Good News Crusade Bible camp.
I was at camp.
I could be that girl in a few years time.
There was no guarantee that I wouldn’t end up demon-possessed if I committed some kind of sin. And I knew I was a sinner. How could I be sure that I wasn’t already inflicted with some kind of Satanic presence?
The rush of theological computations left me feeling sick. It also made me change my mind about not leaving the caravan: I needed to stock up on all the prayer and Bible teaching I could get. It would be my insurance against Possession.
Sensing that I might not be taking in any more of their biblical assurances, Dad suggested that we all pray together and then get ready to go to our evening meetings. Bowing our heads, we prayed that Jesus would come and give us peace and renew our trust in his care for us. We prayed for the afflicted girl that she would be free and assured of God’s love for her. And we committed ourselves – particularly fervently in my case – to being open to what God wanted to do in our lives for the last two days of camp.
That evening the film being screened for us in the Power Pack tent was Run Baby Run, about New York gang leader Nicky Cruz’s conversion to Christ. I was perfectly happy to put heavenly warfare right out of my mind and focus back onto the fight against flesh and blood nasties like Nicky Cruz and his homies. And on the back row our little gang chewed on Wham! bars and passed cans of Fanta between ourselves, enjoying the kind of carefree, uncomplicated fellowship that sometimes even kids doing business with God at Bible camp need.
This was the comprehensive schoolgirl who wasn’t allowed to watch Grange Hill or Ghostbusters. The girl who was set apart for Jesus. Set apart from her peers only to be told she is God’s light put among them to share with them the Good News.
The good news for me was that once a year I got to be with friends who knew what it was like; who also found salvation in simply belonging.
Note
1 Luke 8.27-33.