My first memory of camp meeting is like awakening from sleep. I seem to be looking out from inside a dark cave, not unlike Plato's famous cave. I must have been almost three years old.

Images, sounds, and even smells appear and then disappear. I remember walking up these creaking stairs, and then down a long corridor with many doors. I had never been in a building like this before. From old black and white photos I now know the place was the girls' dormitory at Mount Ellis Academy.

Next, I remember my mother unpacking our blankets and the grocery sacks of food and the sounds of footsteps passing in the hallway, with doors opening and closing, adults greeting each other outside our door, and children laughing and running down the hall.

For the first time in my life I remember thinking about my world, rather than simply experiencing it, or imagining myself in some fantasy world. Other families, I sensed, were in rooms just like ours, and were doing essentially the same things we were, but they inhabited a different world than mine.

Some were more worldly than our family (they didn't go to many meetings) and some far stricter (they wore long dresses and the men wore beards). I sensed, although I do not remember it, that I could set the course of my life as well, for my mother tells me that when it came time for Sabbath School I told her that she didn't have to go with me. I could go on my own. Camp meeting provided the opportunity to enter a world with wider horizons than I had known before.

Camp meeting continued to provide an opening to a wider world of ideas, friendships, and personal freedom as I grew through my teens. Growing up on a farm, I found that camp meeting provided release from the work. We were never able to take a whole week off, but we would begin shopping for food and packing up our sleeping bags on Thursday afternoon so that we could leave early Friday morning.

For every mile as we drove in our open-windowed car, the air became cooler and the surrounding hills greener. Just outside of Laurel we passed a sandstone citadel where Jim Bridger and Wild Bill Hickock were said to have held off a band of Indians. At Columbus we could see the Rosebud, where General Reno first had a skirmish with a band of Sioux Indians before his fateful meeting with Custer at the Little Bighorn. Finally, we would come over the Bozeman pass and into the Gallatin valley, first shown to white men by Sacagawea. In our going to camp meeting, the yearly feasts and sojourns of Israelites, the stories of the Old West, and our family history became one.

As we turned off the highway and drove up the gravel road toward the campground my heart would race with the excitement of seeing friends and meeting new people-especially girls. Inevitably, on the drive home after camp meeting was over I would hardly pay attention to that same landscape. My thoughts were always back with my friends, sometimes on a sermon, and at times on a girl I was too shy to meet.

Camp meetings have always been conceived as convocations centered on fiery preaching and souls finding the Lord. But there has always been a lot more to them. A description of a "field meeting" in the back country of England from the year 1759 suggests why Ellen White in her own day made repeated appeals for Adventist camp meetings to be governed by order and decorum, with greater attention placed upon one's spiritual condition than upon dress and food. Here is the English "field meeting":

[A]t first you find a great number of men and women lying upon the grass; here they are sleeping and snoring, some with their faces toward heaven, others with their faces turned downwards, or covered with bonnets; there you find a knot of young fellows and girls making assignations to go home together in the evening, or to meet in some ale-house; in another place you see a circle around some ale-barrel, many of which stand ready upon carts for the refreshment of the saints.... In this sacred assembly there is an odd mixture of religion, sleep, drinking, courtship, and a confusion of sexes, ages and characters.

Remove the reference to alcohol, and this critical description of an early camp meeting is colorfully descriptive of most camp meetings I have attended. As a young pastor at the Gladstone campground in Oregon, I often felt that I had been transported back into the 19th century. The same huge crowd of the faithful listened spellbound to a preacher in a grove of trees, as around the edges of the meeting I could see people sitting or lying in tents, walking about, or talking with friends.

Camp meetings have always attracted not only the faithful but also the simply curious, the social, and even the unruly. Both the intensity of emotion and the crowds of the curious led most Presbyterians and Baptists to abandon camp meetings by the time of the Civil War. Methodists and their descendents continued camp meetings, but sought to domesticate them. Ironically, the very need to bring decorum to these gatherings and weed out the excesses of the 19th century has sapped most of the life out of modern-day camp meetings.

The focus of such a meeting ought to be upon the spiritual, but when the value of these gatherings is limited to their effectiveness in converting souls and inspiring revival in the church, the very thing that is sought may be lost. Early camp meetings had three things in common outside of preaching: 1) they were located in places of recognized beauty-often in groves of trees that came to be viewed as sacred groves; 2) people left their everyday drudgery to celebrate with friends, leading to one early observation that camp meetings were one giant potluck; and 3) people found physical as well as spiritual refreshment in their lives.

I have wondered at times what evangelists will do in heaven. I am certainly in favor of revival and evangelism. But for me the work of the church is just that-work. It is like being back on the farm. There is a great deal of satisfaction that comes from planting, cultivating, watering, and harvesting. Outside of camp meetings, my fondest memories of childhood are harvesttime, when a crew of men would sit around our table telling stories and complimenting my mother on her good cooking. But even harvesttime is work.

Heaven I envision as camp meeting. I imagine great storytelling (I really can't imagine preaching in heaven). But most of all I imagine traveling to someplace at least as beautiful as the Gallatin. While I cannot share the poet John Greenleaf Whittier's difficulty in comprehending "how it is that this goodly, green sunlit home of ours is under a curse," I have to agree with him that in "September sunsets, changing forests, moonrise and cloud, sun and rain" I more often see "the perfect work of infinite love as well as wisdom," than in a good deal of preaching.

In part, the decline of camp meetings is due to the fact that campgrounds once selected for their natural beauty are today surrounded by shopping malls and fast-food restaurants, and are within easy driving distance of home or motels. Preaching alone is not enough to get people to camp meeting. On this Ellen White agreed.

Few people are eager to go to heaven just to have some text of Scripture explained. We have eternity during which to learn the truth. Like camp meeting, what people anticipate most about heaven is finding friends and loved ones and meeting the Jesus who made it all possible. In other words, heaven sounds a lot like camp meeting around the edges of the big tent-people talking to friends, laughing, hugging each other, and making plans to eat together.

Now when I think of heaven in these terms, I feel all the same excitement and anticipation I used to have as we left the work of the farm behind and headed to Bozeman for camp meeting. The air becomes cooler. The grass greener. I feel refreshed.

Glen Greenwalt is a theologian and an artist.