EDMOND—Evangelist Wayne Turgeon will direct this year’s Philadelphia Youth Camp. His summer camp experience began in 1980 as a counselor for the Worldwide Church of God’s Summer Educational Program in Loch Lomond, Scotland. Since the mid-’90s, he has taught occasional sports and speech classes, served as an assistant director and now as director for several years.

Will you describe your favorite memory from all your years at pyc? The meals. Delicioso. [Also] just seeing the youth catch the vision and open up and change in that short of a period.

One-on-one with the asst. director

Philadelphia Youth Camp assistant director Eric Burns has accumulated 11 years of summer camp experience as operations manager and assistant director. He recently shared a camp memory from the early days and a camp goal for this year’s session:“Housing has always been a big challenge at pyc. One year, we got the bright idea to put the guys in a tent city. It must have rained every night at 2 in the morning.”

The frequent downpour resulted in collapsing tents and groggy boys.

This year, Mr. Burns says he expects more interesting occurrences, hopefully not as drastic as the tent city chaos. He has a goal: Inspire the male campers to challenge themselves.

Recalling his own childhood, Mr. Burns said, “If you found a couple nails and a board, immediately you thought, ‘We’re going to build a fort.’”

“Our young men are having a hard time seeing achievement in front of them,” he says. “Without that, it’s just hard work. Society has told our boys, ‘Quit trying to be the boss.’”

Ideally, the male campers will learn from the hwac men they interact with each day, Mr. Burns said. “The guys who come out of this college are changed men. It’s the opportunities they have to be leaders and step up.”

Mr. Burns says he plans to show the young men the benefits and satisfaction that come with achievement and hard work.

How does camp rank in terms of your responsibilities? Education is a big part of the ministry, and part of my job as a teacher at AC and a principal for IA. I don’t know if I could really [assign] one, two, three, four, five. Some summers, you say selfishly that you would just like to have the whole summer off. But it’s only three weeks, and these kids will be able to change for the rest of their lives. How do we know if we might be able to reach one, two, more, several more if we have the opportunity again?

Do you remember any specific instances of seeing a change in a camper’s life? I don’t know that it comes through the lectures as much as it comes through one-on-one counseling. We might hear about lecture results after the fact, but generally it’s going to be in those counseling sessions where they take correction and run with it and make a change in their lives.

What makes you enjoy playing softball with the campers? That’s one sport I can fairly do at my age. … It gets me hands-on involved. Early on, I had to spend a lot of time with all the lectures, but now I’ve gotten that set.

Can you share a story from sep? We had a really wet, stormy camp [in Scotland]. It was after Mt. St. Helens had blown in May, so it was just raining throughout all of Europe. It was the wettest summer on record for many years. It was storming, with thunder and lightning. The guys were all, “Eeeee. Ooohhhh,” scared to death. I got down on the middle of the floor—I don’t know if I could do it now—and cranked out 100 pushups and said, “If I hear another peep, all of you are going to get down and do the same number.” I sat up for hours waiting for some noise from anybody, and it was dead quiet.

What do you like about directing camp? Family, children, young people. Such an important part of the Work under Mr. Armstrong and now Mr. Flurry. It’s helpful that I’m the principal of that same age group on the middle- and high school-level. I’m pretty blessed in that I don’t have some of the typical writing deadlines as some of the employees, so it does free them up to keep doing what they do. … I did miss it a lot, that one summer [2010]. I had to hear all the chanting and singing. It was almost unbearable, because I was so involved with it before. To be out of it was such a dramatic shift.

Any hints about the camp theme? It’s from a scripture in the Old Testament. Hopefully that narrows it down a bit for you!