My family started attending the Philadelphia Church of God in April 1990, with a local congregation of eight people (making us one of its largest congregations in the world). By 1992, there were five teenagers in the area—perhaps the most of any congregation. For the most part, pcg teens were scattered with letter writing and long-distance phone calls as the only available forms of communication, not that anyone was actually making pricey long-distance phone calls.

You can probably sympathize with this situation: While there are far more teens in God’s Church today, you probably rarely see more than a few during the week. And though the Internet may unlock forms of communication that were not available in my youth—e-mail, Twitter, Skype, etc.—that doesn’t fully replace live human contact with other teenagers who believe what you believe. You do experience the real deal at least once a year at the Feast of Tabernacles. Many of you also have had the opportunity at least once to go to the Philadelphia Youth Camp (pyc). I attended the first pyc in 1992, which was established before the college, before the building of Armstrong Auditorium, and even well before the pcg printed Mystery of the Ages.

The 30 teenagers who would attend pyc were meeting each other, in many cases, for the first time in Red Top Mountain, Georgia. In some respects, it bore little semblance to the camp you know today. Most of the sports you associate with camp—archery, softball, basketball, etc.—were not part of the camp. We didn’t have stick night or entertainment night. We did have cycling, dancing and water skiing (or in my case, water dunking). Hiking and tennis were scheduled activities.

Our 19 workers and 30 campers stayed in lodges with eight people to a cabin—fully equipped with a kitchen, hot water, a living room and two bedrooms. In my dorm, our counselor set a strict rule: 20 minutes maximum for our hot showers!

After our initial camp orientation that first Sunday, we spent the day on the beach, then came back to the camp for dinner and a dance class, launching into activities on the second day. On the third day, the entire camp took a trip from our usual campgrounds to Stone Mountain, Georgia, where we watched a laser show on the side of the mountain after a full day of activities.

The most important parts of camp—the Bible lectures, the speech classes, the interaction with like-minded instructors and teenagers—were already in place. Its organizers had followed the template Herbert W. Armstrong established with the Summer Educational Program (sep) camps, as we do today. One of the articles on this website, “Your Garden-of-Eden Choice” by Ryan Malone, was based on a lecture his father gave at that first pyc that we heard as campers. Stephen Flurry served as our speech and tennis instructor. Dennis Leap served as camp director, as he did for many years following, and taught Bible classes on The Missing Dimension in Sex ; he also taught cycling.

On Friday night, Pastor General Gerald Flurry gave a Bible study showing that there would be an end-time Elijah who would turn the hearts of the children to their fathers (Malachi 4:5-6) and explaining that this camp was part of that prophecy’s fulfillment. On the Sabbath, he gave a sermon about the little book in Revelation 10. That night, we held a dance, taking our two-step, waltz, polka, eastern swing and county line well past a modern pyc curfew.

We spent our last day at White Water Bay, a huge park with many water slides, a considerably different close to camp than the All Stars events and Awards Night you have today. pyc was over in just eight days, concluding with a meal at Old Country Buffet and a parking lot full of weepy teenagers who would not see each other again until the Feast of Tabernacles in Oklahoma City—a given, since there was still only one u.s. site.

Over time, the expansion of pyc has been phenomenal and a great benefit to our teens. The original eight days has become a three-week experience. Many new activities have been added and a much more rigorous program has developed. We’ve gone from 30 campers—six to a dorm—to 144 teens eager to learn, as Mr. Leap told us at those early camps, that God’s way of life works beautifully. And in three weeks, another 144 campers will have learned that lesson.