Called to Christian Camping

By Penny Hunter and Jeff Finley

Ed McDowell is an ordained elder whose diverse ministry roles in the Free Methodist Church USA have ranged from lead pastor of a Colorado congregation to dean of students at Central Christian College of Kansas. Both inside the denomination and across the wider body of Christ, however, he is most well-known as the executive director of Warm Beach Camp and Conference Center, which serves more than 90,000 people each year.

The Christian Camp and Conference Association (CCCA) recently created the Ed McDowell Award for Outstanding Leadership in Christian Camping and announced its first recipient is its namesake. In the future, the award will be given to others who exhibit the key traits and will carry McDowell’s name in honor of his many contributions to Christian camping.

The award — presented to McDowell by CCCA President and Chief Executive Officer Gregg Hunter — recognizes the Christlikeness, humility, collaboration and wisdom of a leader in the Christian camping movement. According to CCCA leadership, the award was named after McDowell because he exemplifies those qualities.

“These traits are hallmarks of Ed’s character and his service to Christian camping across the country,” Hunter said. “He’s done so much for and has been a blessing to Christian camping, CCCA and countless leaders who have worked with him over the years.”

McDowell told Light + Life that because of health issues among several Warm Beach staff members, he wasn’t able to attend the conference at which the award was announced, but he was asked to do a Zoom call with Hunter during the conference. McDowell said he thought they were going to share about an initiative they both had been working on together, and he was surprised and “completely humbled” when he was instead told about the award.

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“One of the things I love most about the Christian camping community is the ability to stay focused on the main things of the gospel and to stay united around.” – Ed McDowell

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“The Christian camping community has been a huge community in my life. They’ve been a beautiful expression of the body of Christ. I have friends all around the country and all around the world because of the years spent working with this,” McDowell said. “I immediately thought about all of the people who’ve gone before me and then all of the other people that, if I had been designing this, I would have chosen, because it is such a humbling, beautiful community of people to serve with. One of the things I love most about the Christian camping community is the ability to stay focused on the main things of the gospel and to stay united around, and it’s just so sweet to serve with these people over all these years.”

McDowell has served as a board member with CCCA for more than 15 years. In addition to his role at Warm Beach and the CCCA board, McDowell has worked with CCCA to develop and direct a program called Thriving Boards, which offers specialized coaching and consulting to Christian camp and conference center boards across the United States.

“The misconception on camp is that it’s a one-off experience,” said McDowell, who added that, in reality, camp can be an “experience of a lifetime that becomes a pivot point that changes lives.”

He said the CCCA includes 870 camps “across the United States. We currently serve over 6 million people annually, and we have a huge focus on keeping the path clear to the cross of Jesus Christ through the camp experience. It is built around having integrity of Scripture, honest and loving relationships with campers, and then making sure that everything we do is aboveboard when it comes to standards. of safety, standards of care, standards of conduct.”

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“I hope that, by the end of the day, there will be a little bit more of the kingdom of God on earth because we who are following Jesus have been faithful.” – Ed McDowell

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While he appreciates the award, McDowell isn’t involved in Christian camping for recognition.

“The whole heart behind a life of service is to draw people to Christ, and, honestly, that’s what I try to get up to do every day and in my imperfect ways,” he said. “I hope that, by the end of the day, there will be a little bit more of the kingdom of God on earth because we who are following Jesus have been faithful.”

Stewarding a Piece of God’s Kingdom

Many institutions have lost their Christian emphasis as they expand their services, but Warm Beach clearly states in its core values, “By honoring God first, we seek to align our vision and ministry development with Christ’s calling to share the good news of His love and forgiveness. We are a Christ-centered and Bible-based organization, meaning all decisions are grounded in Scripture.”

When asked how Warm Beach — an hour’s drive north of Seattle in Stanwood, Washington — retains its Christian focus while serving as a premier camp, conference and retreat facility in the Pacific Northwest, McDowell replied, “I think that, first off, is you begin with your board of directors, and the board is a spiritual community called by God to steward a piece of His kingdom on earth.”

He said that when the board understands this spiritual stewardship role, “then it becomes a sacred trust” with a focus on mission that includes an evangelistic approach of “reaching out into the world” and safeguarding and protecting” that mission.

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“Drift is so insidious and so incremental that if you don’t have your eyes wide open, it can sneak up on you.” – Ed McDowell

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“The second thing comes down to not only myself but our team as to: Who are we as people of God, and what are we doing to attend to our own relationships with God, and how are we sharing about that? What kind of accountability is going on?” McDowell said. “Drift is so insidious and so incremental that if you don’t have your eyes wide open, it can sneak up on you.

“In John 17, Jesus talks about: ‘Father, I want them to be one as You and I are one, so the world will know that You really sent me,’” McDowell added. “He also says they’ll experience a deep love for each other and doing this. So there’s something about being united and staying focused on the right thing that reveals who Jesus really is to the world.”

McDowell said this is “more effective than strategy” and also “sends a really clear message to the world, and it creates a really deep relationship rooted in love to serve with in this world.”

Strategy, of course, still matters.

“Our strategic focus for the next five years is to connect a million people with Jesus by partnering with leaders in providing transformational experience,” McDowell said. “That’s our conviction of what the Lord’s asked us to thoughtfully and carefully reach for, and so we’re working with a lot of different church leaders and other ministry and educational leaders to say: What does that look like? How can we help you? How can we support you?”

Expanding Warm Beach’s Reach

When McDowell became Warm Beach’s executive director in 1995 following a time as pastor of the First Free Methodist Church in Denver, the camp wasn’t new to him. In fact, he said, “I grew up at Warm Beach.”

He explained that the Free Methodist Church’s Washington (now Pacific Northwest) Conference started Warm Beach in 1956 because its two existing camps were in the path of construction for Interstate 5. The conference invited other denominations to use Warm Beach as well, and that cross-denominational collaboration continues to this day.

McDowell’s grandparents sold a business a three-hour drive south of the camp to become bi-vocational and serve as “part of a big group of volunteers and pastors and lay leaders that began to put this camp together,” McDowell said. “Literally coming to visit grandma and grandpa growing up was coming to Warm Beach Camp.”

His father, Bob, also served as a Free Methodist pastor and became the public relations director for the denomination’s “The Light and Life Hour” radio program at the denomination’s then-headquarters in Winona Lake, Indiana. He returned to the Pacific Northwest for a pastoral position and then — when Ed McDowell was in the eighth grade — was told, “We need a full-time director for Warm Beach year-round.”

When McDowell accepted the same role that his father had accepted in 1974, he “didn’t come back because of family history,” he said. “I came back because of a real profound sense of God’s call on my life to do it.”

McDowell has overseen a time of outreach and growth at Warm Beach that included the 1997 launch of “The Lights of Christmas,” which began as a way to serve the community in a slower season. Now things are anything but slow at Warm Beach during December and late November as the event, which features more than 1 million lights, has become the largest Christmas festival in the Pacific Northwest. More than 1.2 million people have participated in “The Lights of Christmas” since it began.

The camp’s ministry also has extended to South Korea for Warm Beach Camp Korea, which has brought together U.S. and Korean teams for two weeks of cross-cultural relationships. The program, which is currently on hold because of coronavirus restrictions, includes a day camp for North Korean refugees and a weeklong ESL camp for kids combined with a youth camp for middle to high school students.

Another area of growth has occurred in the past few years with Warm Beach Camp Ministries expanding to two other locations, Black Diamond Camp and Rainier Camp & Retreat Center, in Western Washington.

“During COVID, there was another camping organization in the Northwest that had deep roots, and they had gone through a major shift in their board of directors who over a few years had reinvested in this camping ministry. Then once they got through their season of reinvestment and got things up and going at a better level, they turned to us and said, ‘We want to give these camps to you and have you guys take them over,’” McDowell said. “We’ve been doing that for a little over two years, and it’s been fantastic what’s been happening. The whole vision of this generosity of gifting these to Warm Beach centered around their confidence in that board having a sacred trust of what this stewardship looked like moving forward.”

McDowell said incorporating the two other camps required “a team effort to do it. The Free Methodist Foundation [now known as FM Financial] was very instrumental behind the scenes and helped me pull together all the logistics for that to be possible.”

McDowell said the CCCA has an initiative, Corners of the Field, and its “sole purpose is to get kids who are in foster care into a week of Christian camp every summer.” Warm Beach has always tried to help children with challenging issues or backgrounds.

“The camp’s had a long history of reaching out and working with kids who are vulnerable in different ways. We’ve done a lot of work with Angel Tree camping and bringing kids whose parents are incarcerated to camp. We’ve worked with Youth for Christ where they have special work going on in some gang-intense areas, and we brought a lot of those kids to camp,” he said. “We’ve done adoptive and foster family camps and have worked with regional ministries in partnering with them on that. We’ve done a lot of work with families who are working with HIV/AIDS in their family.”

While partnering with other denominations and nondenominational ministries, Warm Beach continues to serve and bless Free Methodists in and beyond the Pacific Northwest. Warm Beach worked with Sister Connection to start an ongoing camping ministry, Camp Burundi. For more than 30 years, Warm Beach has been a partner of Rancho Betania, a Free Methodist camp and conference center in Mexico.

Family Matters

While committed to camping, McDowell is also focused on his family. He and his wife, Bev, have nine children — the five youngest of whom are adopted. They also have 14 grandchildren, six of whom are adopted.

While 19-year-old Central students engaged to be married, he and Bev took an interterm class on marriage and family. The course included a weeklong segment on building a family through adoption.

“We would both tell you that we had a very clear moment with God in that week saying, ‘This is going to be part of your life,’” he said. “We got married with that conviction, not knowing what it meant.”

The couple’s adoptions all occurred after they came to Warm Beach.

“Several other families in our camp and the church also joined into adoption, and even in the broader Stanwood-Camano community, there was just a heart of adoption that was opened up, and it became a place for families to do that,” he said. “Along the way, our eldest daughter and her husband shared in the heart for that, and so they adopted six kids themselves. Definitely it’s been an integrated part of our journey.”
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