Upper New York Camp & Retreat Ministries (CRM) is excited to announce that registration is now open for its 2018 Summer Camp & Retreat programs. Program details are available online and brochures will be mailed out in the coming weeks. Brochures will be sent to past participants and campers as well as all Upper New York Annual Conference churches.
“We are excited about the high quality and excellent variety of programs being offered… →
We’ve created a monthly series of Harvey the Hippo desktop wallpaper calendars for 2018. Each month you’ll have a variety of sizes from which to choses. We update this page monthly, so you’ll want to check back often.
Clicking any of the image size links below will open the wallpaper in a new browser tab. From there, you can save the image to your computer or set it as your… →
Chances are that if you are reading this, you already possess the most important quality of a Sky Lake Campbassador: interest in Sky Lake. There are a few other qualities below, but basically a Sky Lake Campbassador is someone who is willing to receive an email from us one to four times per month and share the materials included in each email at church, online, and with friends.
Here are some necessary… →
We’ve been hard at work on putting together another amazing summer line-up for 2018. As you might notice we’ve restructured our schedule a bit to bring together similar sessions of different ages under what we’re now referring to as “theme weeks”. We’re excited about this transition which we believe will help us better offer a clear line of progression to help campers grow as they mature.
Our summer brochure… →
The Fall edition of our newsletter, Xenia News, is now available online. Click here to read about what’s been going in the life of Upper New York Camp and Retreat Ministries.… →
It’s not all that uncommon for us to be asked: “what do you do here the rest of the year?” Some might get upset when asked this sort of question, but we hear this as a genuine invitation to share more about our ministry here at Sky Lake. (Which is also why we’ve started sharing a glimpse behind the scenes in this column each month.)
Sure, we have some rather… →
We here at Sky Lake are grateful to be able to spend time with so many awesome people throughout the year. While our summer camp ministry brings a certain level of intensity to the life of our team, we’re also kept on our toes extending radical Christian hospitality to retreat guests from the end of summer camp in August until June the following year. We provide hospitality support to a wide… →
Can’t get that song out of your head? Interested in what other songs we sang in Chapel throughout 2017? Well look no further! Below is a list of all the songs we sang in Chapel this past summer following the theme “The Vine.” If you’d like to listen to all of them on YouTube, we’ve created a Summer 2017 Chapel Songs Playlist.
1. 1000 Tongues by Vertical Church Band
2. All the Poor and… →
This past summer we made a concerted effort to better articulate and live out Sky Lake’s long-held core values of invitational Christian discipleship, connecting with God’s natural creation, and commitment to living in intentional community. To help campers better understand this last core value, we developed the Hemlock Community Values program.
The Eastern Hemlock is a sturdy coniferous tree which can be found in abundance at higher elevations in eastern… →
Michael Thompson, PhD, draws upon his experiences as a father, school psychologist, and years of camping to write about something that everyone experiences at some point in their lives: homesickness.
In Homesick and Happy: How Time Away from Parents Can Help a Child Grow, Thompson helps parents and camp professionals see the value in helping individuals not only survive this common ailment, but to actually thrive from it. In short, to see… →
We’re currently in that time of year when schools and churches are starting to wind down for summer. But for those of us in the camping ministry, this is when we start to gear up for another awesome season of impacting the lives of young and old, neurotypical and differently abled individuals, first-timers and those who have been coming to camp longer than I’ve been alive! It doesn’t take… →
Ever wonder what you can do to be a leader at camp?
Every summer Sky Lake runs several weeks of active and meaningful Special Needs programs and we couldn’t do it without our Special Needs Assistant Personnel, or SNAPs, working with us.
SNAPs are older youth volunteers. Still considered as campers, SNAPs work alongside our counselling staff to gain leadership skills, make friendships that last for life, and spend time at… →