Welcome to another episode of dwell on these things. My name is Brian Adams. I'm your host today. I am the director of student ministries here at dwell, and I am here with Shane Coulter, one of our high school central teaching teachers, as well as the director of our summer camp epic. How you doing, Shane? Doing good. Good. So hey, we're here this afternoon to talk with you guys about a major shift that we made in our fundraising efforts for our camps. As many of you know, we have two major summer camps here in dwell for our high school and middle school students, those being epic for high schoolers and blowout camp for middle schoolers. They're six and five night camps respectively, and they have played a major part in our ministry for many, many years now. But we had to make a big shift. A year ago, we talked at the vision and stewardship meeting about changing our approach to fundraising. You see, when we started these camps, they started around the cost of around $400 for about six nights, which felt like a lot, but was a manageable amount, especially for a family of two or three. It was something that they could manage. But in recent years, costs have risen to at or around $600 for each of these camps. And that's still just a little over $100 a night. While the American Camp Association reported in 2023 that the average overnight camp costs $448 per night. So we're saving significant money compared to the average camp, but nonetheless, it has created significant financial need, and that has created a dramatic need for increase in fundraising across our church, especially because anyone who's familiar with our student ministry knows that we are, as God calls us, reaching families who come from impoverished backgrounds, families who need financial support. These camps, they're incredible, and kids want to go. They love going. They spend their entire year looking forward to the camp as the highlight of their week, but there are families who simply cannot put forward the cash necessary that is required to be able to attend. You think about the busing required, the amount of meals required, the overnight lodging, the camp costs, there's significant funds that go into running each of these camps, even at the bare-bones costs that we are charging. And so even for a Dwell family, when you've got two, three, four kids all attending camp in the same year, the stretch on that budget is significant. It's a big deal. And I used to run Epic, actually, back in the day, and when I did that, like I said, the camp costs weren't as high as they are now, and leadership did most of their own fundraising for their own home churches. Each leadership team's got 25 to 40 kids. They'd raise money for the ones who need help, so they'd organize their own fundraisers. They'd do car washes. They'd throw parties. They'd ask people for donations, and they'd go around and make money for all their kids to go to camp because they want to see these kids go. And there are some leaders who lead groups where 95 percent of their students cannot afford to pay much of anything to attend camp, and so there's a significant strain, especially on some certain specific groups, and that creates a real problem for leaders. It creates a significant challenge because our leaders are so dedicated. They're so hardworking. They're going to do anything possible to get their students to camp because they want to. Yeah, and you're just an average 22-year-old working your first job fresh out of college, and you've got to throw onto your plate, make 10K. Yeah. Make 10K this spring to send all your kids you really care about to camp. It's a gargantuan task for a leadership team to achieve, but it's something that we're so eager and earnest to do because we know anyone who's been to Epic or BlogCamp will tell you that it is a life-changing experience. We're seeing kids come to Christ in droves at these camps. We're seeing kids commit their lives to Christ in droves at these camps. We have people, I mean, even Shane himself has testified that the week at summer camp was life-changing for his walk with God when he was a student. Now here he is leading the camps himself. So our leaders are so earnest and hardworking in their desire to see all of their kids attend camp, but that creates a serious strain on our leaders because you talk about being a fundraiser like this on top of all the responsibilities of leadership, things like teaching the Bible, mentoring students, following up with non-Christians, driving, praying. I mean, that's a load and that was difficult but manageable when the cost was $400, but it feels borderline impossible these days with a 50% cost increase to camp. So Shane, I wanted to ask, being in the position both of camp director and high school leader yourself, what's it like, right? Like trying to manage all these responsibilities, you're trying to be a leader, you're trying to fundraise. How do you make it all work and keep all these plates spinning? It's a good question. I mean, it's a lot of why we decided to make this change was because the plates can't spin. They just fall and crash. When you have all that going on and you basically try to throw into your leadership workload and schedule, being a party planner, scheduler for one of these fundraisers, which for a lot of our leaders, it's just not something that's really in their doghouse. Right. And we bring them in to lead these groups because they are really serious about Scripture and they know their Bible and they want to mentor students and they want to teach the Bible and make the meeting fun. And that's what they're good at. But it's almost impossible to go to them and say, okay, well now on top of that, you got to come up with thousands, many thousands. If you want to help these students you really care about to be able to go to summer camp. So I don't know. I remember being in college and running fundraisers of my own for my home church and just feeling like, I don't know, I was beating all the friends in my life over the head, begging them constantly to attend some of these janky fundraisers so that my life would be less stressful. And yeah, it basically sucks. You need to, I don't know. You need to be mean, aggressively hitting up all the people in your life to come to something that they don't want to come to. Or we would do stuff like, I'm trying to think of what some of these fundraisers would look like over the years. A lot of like before CTs you would see students come in planning to sell a dinner. So you're a college student walking into a CT. You've already eaten your dinner. And then you see a bunch of students attempting to look as poor and pathetic as possible standing at the door accosting you with a plate of spaghetti that you're supposed to drop $20 on. Highly uncomfortable. Uncomfortable as the leader of the home group trying to sell that. I've been a part of some of these godforsaken spaghetti dinners and it's not comfortable. It's not good food. It's like, man it's reminding me of the, at the end of Goodfellas where he gets kicked out of the mob and he's like, here I am eating egg noodles and ketchup instead of spaghetti. That's like what we're peddling is egg noodles and ketchup. That's right. So it was just kind of uncomfortable. And a lot of work and typically groups would do a number of these fundraisers and come back and say, well, we're still nowhere close. Thousands short. Yeah. So we ended up in kind of this conundrum of like the church was being generous in all these different fundraising efforts. They always have been and we've always been able to send all the students to camp. But the toll seemed to be immense. It was stressful. A lot of these leaders, they're just not, they don't know how to approach it. And for the people in our church that were being generous, it was just kind of awkward is the best way to put it. And you're getting bombarded all camp season. You kind of know once the calendar turns, all of a sudden people are going to be coming at you from 10 different directions every week trying to get you to donate more and more. Right. I mean, you know, you've got like 30 high school groups. Just think in high school that are all coming at you asking for money because the fundraising efforts have just been, you know, decentralized. And so now it's like, well, how much do I give to this group versus this one? It can, it can become, I'm sure that can be pretty challenging for a donor. Sure. So we definitely observed that this was a issue and it became a bigger one as mentioned as the costs have increased. As a ministry, you're just thinking more macro scale here. We don't want our leaders focused on fundraising. Fundraising is important. I mean, it matters. We want to see every kid go to camp, but we don't want that to happen at the expense of things like discipleship and follow up with new and non-Christians. That's, that's much more important. That's what they signed up for. That's what they're there to do. And so as a staff, we decided to completely change the vision and that vision and stewardship this past year, I pitched the fiscal support team on a new vision of the fundraising efforts all becoming centralized with our staff team, people who are, you know, well-trained in the area of fundraising who have put on some very good events and also to consolidate our efforts. So instead of getting, you know, hit up every week at CT, for example, there are just, you know, four fundraisers a year where all of the money centralized. If you want to give to camp, go to one of these four things that eases the burden on our leadership that eases the burden on the church and the donors. On top of that, we asked the fiscal support team to put a generous sum of money into our church's general fund, $90,000. We put into the general fund. We requested it. This was approved by vote. And then we did these fundraisers on top of it. We did a party for our college ministry. We did an event called the Toast to Camps. We ran a 5K fundraiser at Sharon Woods Metro Park and did a March Madness fundraiser. Shane, you had a real significant hand in the development and implementation of these fundraisers. So, you know, let our audience know these guys approved these fundraisers. They approved this new plan. We pitched it as this vision of like this is going to raise a ton of money. This is going to really help our leadership. It's really going to help the camp. And ultimately, most importantly, it's really going to help the students be able to attend camp easily, fruitfully, and really just help our camps and our students grow. So would you say that this was successful? And do you have any thoughts on how it went in retrospect a year later? Yeah. I mean, our leaders across the ministry in high school and middle school reported that it was an immense weight off their shoulders to not have to worry all the time about fundraising. And that was the goal was that we could take that off their mind. We could try to do it for them. And then for the donors in our church, the idea in just doing a few really well-run events was let's take away all of these mini fundraisers that are just pestering and instead hand back to the church a chance to come to one of these events that will actually be enjoyable. And that was our thinking was could we get some of our people and our fellowship that are really talented at planning events to put some of these on and give people in our church a chance to be generous in the way that they always are, but just do it in a setting where they're having fun and enjoying the incredible fellowship that God's given us. So that's the tact that we decided this year. And I think it was really effective. By and large, you ran the 5K. That's your brainchild, which involved how many? A hundred some people getting together in the pouring rain to run to hurt themselves in the rain in the slosh mucking about at Sharon Woods. You were there. I was there sloshing through. I'm duck-footed. My feet point sideways for those that don't know, which means that if you're running through water, there's extra surface area that is impacting the water and it becomes harder. So I would say that three of our four fundraisers were effective, except for the one where you couldn't control the weather. I'm just kidding. The 5K is awesome. People love that. I mean, we've had a couple hundred people do it over the last couple of years, and Brian marks out this course at Sharon Woods and runs a full-on professional 5K, bibs, timing, sponsors, everything. I ran it this year with a guy who I mentor in the high school ministry who's a cross-country runner, and it was, yeah, that was painful. That was difficult, but no, I mean, it's a good example of, like, people love doing it. We've got a bunch of runners in our church and people that are running 5Ks anyway, and it's like they're planning on spending that money on a run at some point this year, and instead, we'll just organize one that's fun and professional, and it was a blast. the people that I work with who helped me organize this 5K, we've done it two years now, and they've told me that it's remarkable the amount of both people that we have signed up within just a couple years of starting our own 5K and the amount of donors who come through. They say that they're just amazed because it normally takes a very long time to build a big, you know, crowd for a new event like this, so they've been pretty blown away by our church's interaction with this event so far. That's so fun. I mean, it was such a good time. So many people out. People are in really good spirits, running, cheering at the finish line. They did a, Brian put on a, he put on a kid's run before the race where they lined up whatever toddlers showed up to run. And I've got a two-year-old who has my jeans who also has duck feet and she came in dead last. She was unmotivated and unprofessional and, you know, shamed the family name. But it was just so, yeah, it was so fun and it's a perfect example of what we're getting at. It's just trying to help people enjoy the things they're already doing. The run has been amazing. We did Toast this year, which was, yeah, Toast for Camps. The AI gave us that name in case that's not abundantly clear. That was a brunch that we ran. That was really, for the middle school and high school ministries, we've got Jess Lynch, Catherine Akers and Katie Willard are the administrators and they're incredible party planners. And they basically put on this brunch where we did a silent auction. They had incredible things up for grabs at the silent auction. People would come in and buy a table. Allie McCance, who's our hospitality manager here at Dwell and an incredible cook, chef, cook. She's really good and she made just unbelievable food. Absolutely wined and dined everyone. Ryan Hall's band played. I tried to ask him what we should call them and he said that they're unnamed and unnameable. He said to something quartet, but they're not a four-piece band. They played and it was just phenomenal. We were there for a couple hours. We got to hear a testimony from some campers that really had their lives changed. People were just in great spirits. They were unbelievably generous. I could not have fathomed how much people were willing to give to help some of these students come to camp. Part of it is that there were a lot of people there who now they're raising families in this church and they came up through these camps and their lives were changed by them and now they're just super happy to be generous at it. We were just floored at that event by how generous people are and it seemed like it achieved that purpose of people just really enjoyed it. They were getting to spend time in community and they were also incredibly generous. It was great. I had several adults come to me after that event and said, I've never been to something so professional at Dwell Community Church. It was truly a remarkable event and it was very successful. I mean, consolidating our efforts, those fundraisers raised an additional $66,000 for students and that money was very well used because I don't know if I mentioned this earlier, but over 600 students combined to attend Epic and Blowout and many need significant help with financial aid. Through the incredible generosity of our church, we were able to meet every student's specific level of financial need so that no student was left out due to inability to pay. So we are very thankful to have such a generous giving church that we're a part of where people are so eager to support the next generation in their efforts to just learn about God, to spend time in fellowship. These camps, again, they're transformative in a way that is hard to put words to, but when students come back from these camps, they are zealous. They're very eager to give God their entire life as they observe what it's like to live in community and experience some of the very best Bible teachings from some of the best teachers in our church. So we are so thankful to you all, to the entire church, all those who gave, the physical support team, for both approving this new vision and also supporting it so earnestly through contributing so many of your hard-earned dollars. So thank you for that. Yeah, it's just really powerful because we that are in the ministry get to see it with our own two eyes because people come in faith and for some special reason at these camps they have the ability to untangle some of their thinking and turn to God and hand their lives over to God and it's just really cool because it's like for our home group leaders, they get to witness that and be a part of it and it's such an encouraging thing about this church that we've got so many people that are not a part of it. They just hear about it, they hear the stories, they get the prayer requests and that's all they need to say this is where God's moving and that's where I should put my money. Right, so Shane, tell us a little bit about 2026. Are we looking at the same fundraisers? Are you guys changing anything? How can people get involved in some of these fundraisers and start to contribute to the camps if they're new to this? Yeah. So it's going to be very similar in 2026. We're going to run just a couple of large events. I think this year we're just going to do three. The 5k, we'll do toast again and a party for the college ministry. So we're just trying to do a couple of things aimed at the specific ministries in our church. We want to just make them even better, throw on some wrinkles, try to keep helping them to be professional and fun and enjoyable for people. So we're going to take a similar approach and what we do is just have different home groups volunteer to help. Their leadership teams will throw in and help put on one of those fundraisers. So it ends up for them just being a couple of hours of work at one of these events so that their group has plenty of money for the year to give to their students. So the biggest thing would be to attend one of these. Send out emails throughout the year sharing information on when they're coming up and you could just choose to donate to camp and we really appreciate when people are willing to just do that. But if you're able to make it work and come to one of these fundraisers, they're a lot of fun. And honestly, it's one of those opportunities you get in a fellowship like ours where you spend so much of your time in your home group with the same 20 or 30 people to get to step back and look at the church at large and just see there's so many good things happening here. So the biggest thing would be to choose to come to one of those, get to experience it and have a really good time. And for a lot of you guys to donate the same money that you kind of felt like God was putting on your heart to donate to camps this year, but to get to do it in that setting. If you want to just donate to camps, you can through the website. If you go to just dwellcc.com slash epic or below out, they've each got a donation page where you can donate and you can leave a comment to specifically demarcate money for a home church or a student in your life that you'd like to donate or you can just donate to the general pool that gets used for financial aid. So if you're not able to come to one of the fundraisers, that's a great opportunity. And beyond that, the church has been really generous just through the general fund and setting aside money for camps. And for that, there's nothing for you guys to do. All that we can really communicate is our appreciation that you're willing to commit so much of your money towards that. So totally. And I got a very specific hyperlink for you if you're interested. You can go to, if you can't attend one of these fundraisers, you can go to dwellcc.org slash epic dash donations. If you want to donate to Epic or dwellcc.org slash middle school slash blowout dash camp slash donate. If you want to give to blowout. Be on the lookout for the 5k. We're currently locking down dates for our 2026 events. I look forward to seeing you guys out there and seeing Shane with his duck feet back out going through the puddles. My time was fine. What was the winning time this year? You know, I want to say it was somewhere in the low 18 minute range if I'm not mistaken. And I came in at like an 1850, 1845. That sounds doubtful but maybe, maybe you did that. I can't really remember. But I can guarantee that, you know, if some of you guys get out there you're going to beat Shane, maybe you'll win. That would be, it'd be great to see. Two years ago. I felt like I finished in front of a lot of people. You probably did. A lot of people walk to be fair. So, well, not all of us are running from our problems like you. I can guarantee that I will not be running fast at that event this year. So you can all come and at least beat me. So, man, that's not true. You said that last year and you finished five minutes ahead of me. Yeah, I'm going to be running a marathon right around that time next year. So, you can count me out. I will be out there for sure contributing my steps. You're going to be running a 50 miler as your punishment for losing our fantasy football league that me and Brian are in together. He's in danger, folks. If you hear this before the league wraps up, you can pray for him. Don't get me started. If I lose this league it's going to be, it's going to be a lot of tears. hey, do we have any other comments on camp in 2026 and beyond before we wrap up here? I would say one of the bigger things you guys could do would be to pray for this year of camp, specifically for Epic. There's going to be a lot of change. We've always, or for the last 14 years, we have gone out to Indiana to Spring Hills location out there. That's kind of been our home. And this year we have to go to their Michigan property. They're not going to be running that camp anymore out in Indiana. And that's difficult. There's going to be a lot of change associated with that. So we basically just have a lot of things to figure out. Camp for us is going to be at a different time, in a different place. And we are anxious about that. We trust that God can use it. And we've been really happy about our relationship with Spring Hill. They just really love our church and our students and have served them a lot over the years. But there's a lot of change. And there's things that we have to figure out that are scary. Like it's a long bus ride and I have to I've got to plan rest stops. And I've got to spend a lot of time thinking about how long 14 year olds can hold their bladder. And how much latitude to trust them with getting off a bus hundreds of miles away from home. So I'm really scared about losing kids at the Saginaw exit. Good luck. I'm really worried about that. And you can pray I don't. So I don't know that there's just going to be a lot of change and we're not totally sure how to meet all of it. So if you want to pray for Epic that would be really helpful because it's definitely going to be a big transition year. Just that students would still be excited to attend and see the vision. So that's the biggest change this year. Everything's the same for Blue Out and they've been having an awesome experience for years out at Machindo. I can testify I've been out to that Michigan camp. It is incredible and it's going to be a nice it's going to be nice experience for our students. I'm excited for them to get to experience it for themselves. So that's great. Well thanks Shane. Coming on this afternoon. I want to thank you all for listening in. If you have other questions or want to know more about this podcast or about Dwell Community Church please visit our website www.dwellcc.org and also you can find our podcast along with our others such as The Word in Ten anywhere you get your podcasts. So thanks for listening.