50 Years of Christian Camping

Miss Mildred McEvers was CBM’s home missionary assigned to South Central PA. She began teaching the Word of God to boys and girls in Franklin and Perry Counties in public schools.

Guided by the Lord in their effort to reach children, the local CBM Committee discovered that Pennsylvania had a law lying dormant, which permits students to be released from public school for the purpose of religious instruction. CBM developed the Released Time Bible Program (Currently the Bible Adventure Program), which allowed students to be released from their classrooms once a week to go to an offsite location to receive Bible teaching.

The program met with favor from parents, churches, the community and the students. Soon “Released Time” became a familiar phrase. In the succeeding years, it has expanded into more than 21 school districts, reaching over 3000 students weekly with the Word of God, and the program is still growing today.

From its inception, Released Time included scripture memorization. To encourage students to memorize verses, incentive awards were offered for various levels of points each student accumulated. The maximum award was a free week of summer camp. Initially CBM held its summer camps at a rented summer facility local to Greencastle, PA. However, as more and more students earned free summer camp, CBM considered building its own facility. A search began for a piece of land that was located in central Franklin County, had water (stream or pond), and some flat land for the buildings. The students involved in Released Time shared the prayer request of the ministry with their parents and one parent offered the first parcel of land, followed later by a second donation of land. The two parcels together were not sufficient for the camp and the prayers continued until a third farmer donated the final acreage. The three area farmers donated nineteen acres of land, which began the site of Camp Joy El.

Giving the name Camp Joy El to the site, CBM Ministries needed to raise $200,000 for the original buildings: a dining hall/chapel and ten cabins.

The local community provided a majority of the labor. Local churches and businesses donated their time, talents and tools to erect the

buildings. With that Camp Joy El opened its doors for the first time to campers that summer.

Over time Camp Joy El became the identity focus of the ministry and the name by which the whole of CBM Ministries was most widely known. Responding to that, the Board of Directors took action to rename the entire organization “Joy El Ministries,” which is who we are today.