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Summer camp gets interdenominational boost
All the pieces were out there, said St. Gabriel's Episcopal Church Pastor Jeunnee Cunningham. All it took was for someone to put them together.
Someone did, and a summer day camp partnership between St. Gabriel's, Camp Meadowkirk and the YMCA of Loudoun County is off and running.
From July 7 to July 23, the YMCA will run day camps at Camp Meadowkirk on Lime Kiln Road east of Middleburg. (YMCA camps at other locations start after the last day of school and run until Labor Day.) St. Gabriel's will offer Vacation Bible School as an opt-in hour of the camp day July 7-11.
Cunningham, who serves on the YMCA board, said, "It just seemed to me, in our area, there is a great need for quality day camps. And St. Gabriel's is always trying to find a way to add a spiritual component to that."
Add to the mix Camp Meadowkirk, formerly Glenkirk in Gainesville, a property of the National Capital Presbytery. It is new to Loudoun, and glad to use its 358 acres and 2.25 miles of Goose Creek. It offers the open space, tall trees, a new pool (complete with wheelchair entry ramp), trained counselors and lifeguards.
The YMCA day campers will use the central pavilion, pool, rope lines and the miles of trails.
The motto on the Meadowkirk brochure, said director Cheryl Hartman, is "Come home to Meadowkirk, a place of grace."
The goal at Meadowkirk, Hartman said, is to "provide a place for people to find peace, to be in nature, to have a place to be in fellowship with other people and with God." Working with the YMCA to open up its acres to day campers advances that mission.
Many of the campers have seen only spindly seedlings on the new streets of their subdivisions, she said. At Meadowkirk, some for the first time see trees larger than they are. "These new communities don't have hardwoods at 40, 50 and 60 feet tall," she said.
The partnership answered the needs of all three, said Wendall Fisher at the YMCA. The YMCA has been running camps for years, and needs a place to do that, especially when JR's Festival Lakes closes and morphs into a Leesburg subdivision. And St. Gabriel's wants to offer a Bible camp.
What better place for a Bible camp than the natural expanse of Meadowkirk, Cunningham asked. "We will celebrate God's creation, will talk about the sun and the stars, fish and animals, plants and humans, and how wonderfully God has created each being."
Campers can sign up at the YMCA or at St. Gabriel's. The two week session is $305 (60 percent of that for one week) and the YMCA provides transportation to and from its office in the Virginia Village Shopping Center in Leesburg. Scholarships are available.
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