For seventy-five years, OP campers, staff, and friends have driven to the “Pennsylvania rain forest”—as one dubbed it—to live in rustic cabins, sleep on thin mattresses, and eat three hot meals a day family style in an un-air-conditioned mess hall at the French Creek Bible Conference (FCBC).

Nobody comes for the park itself. The word “rustic” kept appearing as veteran campers described French Creek to me, but never alongside “charm.” And yet when they learned that I’d never been, many suggested sympathetically that a drive to group site number 1 may be in order. It is obvious that something about French Creek has had a lasting, binding effect on generations of campers.

Life in the Woods

The conference began in 1950 with a single week. Park officials looked the other way for a few years as the number of delegates—as they were called to differentiate the seriousness of the week’s OPC instruction from a run-of-the-mill summer camp—was greater than the facility’s 153-person limit, but soon the conference’s board decided to add a second week; then a third; then a fourth. By 1998, there were six weeks of camp, divided by age, and five weekends for families and post-high school campers. This summer, staff are preparing for four weeks and two weekends of camp.

Mary Laubach was twelve when she attended French Creek Bible Conference’s inaugural year. She remembers an actual trumpeter playing taps and reveille, the dresses or skirts that were required for dinner, and stuffing the straw tick mattresses upon arrival. “The mattresses were nice and puffy the first night, but by the third night they were flat!” she chuckled. She came back every year she could as a camper, met her husband, Larry, at camp, and returned as an adult to serve for fifty consecutive years as its head cook before retiring in 2018. “I enjoyed it, frankly,” Laubach said, and seemed a little nonplussed that any further commentary on the French Creek Bible Conference was needed.

The state park itself opened in 1946, just three years before Robert Atwell came looking for a summer conference location. The mess hall, which includes the kitchen, and the four-bunk cabins were built by the Civilian Conservation Corps in the 1930s. In the years before the washhouse was built, staff shared the single shower in the staff cabin—and campers had the lake, where they also at least once competed to bring a greased watermelon to shore.

That wasn’t the only competition. The cabins were divided into clans, and points accumulated from cabin inspection or Bible memory work or quizzes on the three morning teaching sessions were tallied on the last day. One camper remembered a girls’ cabin hunting for scraps of cloth to make curtains that might secure extra points during inspection, while a boys’ cabin stuffed their beds into the rafters for a more minimalist look.

Cabins also took turns helping at mealtime, bringing the food from the kitchen to the table and going back for refills as needed. As head cook, Mary Laubach managed the kids on kitchen duty as well as a team of four to five cooks and the dish crew. (There’s no dishwasher at French Creek—except the kind with two hands and two feet.) “I don’t know anybody at camp who didn’t work hard,” Laubach remembered. “Things were rustic.”

Laubach learned the ropes from head cook Rebecca Mullen. The famed handwritten Mullen recipe book—whose typed descendant still shows up at camp each year—instructed one to “add leftover chicken” to recipes, with no quantity specified, and incorporated government commodities like cheese, butter, rice, and Spam.

“I love Spam because I ate it at French Creek,” Doug Watson said. Both he and his wife, Betty, came to French Creek as delegates, beginning in the early 1950s. Betty didn’t care for the Spam, or the “rusticness,” but she was a good sport: “I figured if everyone else could sleep when bats were flying around the rafters, I could too,” she said. Doug’s church paid the cost for him to attend, around twelve dollars, but Betty’s church in Queens, New York, had a precondition: “I had to do memory work so that I could get the extra money from my church to go to French Creek,” she recalled.

The Watsons met at camp, married, and through the years Doug served as counselor, dean, director, on the board, and as president of the board. He knows how little remuneration the speakers or directors or head cooks receive. “To survive seventy-five years with the staffing set up as it is, is a clear sign that God has used the camp. That to me is the big deal,” Doug said. It has been an “ongoing, continual blessing to so many of us.”

From Generation to Generation

For the Laubachs and others, French Creek became a generational tradition. While in high school, Mary’s daughter, Becky (Laubach) Fillebrown, would help her mom shop for the groceries for camp; now, Becky is the one doing the shopping. And just as she was brought to camp as a kid while Mary worked in the kitchen, Becky brought her own children. “They had to dry dishes, even when they were little,” she said.

The affectionate term for kids of staff who aren’t old enough to be campers is “staff brat.” The term never bothered Nathan Fillebrown, Becky’s son and former dish-
dryer. “To me, French Creek was everything,” he remembered. “It was as much a home to me as my home was. I would spend four to five weeks there straight in the summer, but it would be on my mind the whole rest of the year.” In their garage through the fall, winter, and spring would be stored the giant army-acquired pots and pans used at camp, along with the rest of the kitchen paraphernalia, including utensil hooks fashioned by Larry Laubach from old wire clothes hangers.

People still remember Nathan as a staff brat in the 1990s who would solemnly introduce himself by first, middle, and last name, but Nathan now serves as director for the 4th-, 5th-, and 6th-grade camp. As such, it’s his job to recruit staff and speakers. When he began directing in 2021, he immediately called on the friends who had been going to camp with him for years, including Dana Schnitzel and Stephen Hayes.

“I was at French Creek when my mom was pregnant with me, and I think I’ve missed one summer since then,” Dana Schnitzel said. French Creek is a family affair for the Schnitzels; her dad and his four siblings all grew up at camp, and many of their children are still involved. “I’ve been working in the kitchen in some capacity since I was thirteen,” she said. When Dana and Nate were kids, they enthusiastically expected to help in the kitchen forever—although, with Mary Laubach as his grandma, they figured Nate would be head cook. But in the mid-2010s, it was Dana who began to step into Mary’s shoes, becoming kitchen coordinator, as it’s called now, in 2019.

“French Creek has had a huge impact on my life and my faith and my family,” Schnitzel said. She loves that she can now be a part of giving that same experience to today’s campers—and she gets to do it with the friends “who have stuck closest with me the longest,” including Fillebrown and Hayes.

In fact, Stephen Hayes, who serves as a counselor, gets a little bothered if anyone suggests that volunteering at French Creek is super sacrificial—daddy longlegs in every sink notwithstanding: “Everyone who’s working there loves to be there. To me, it’s not a sacrifice. If I’m going to take a week, I’m going to take a week at camp. That’s where I want to be. French Creek people are my people.”

God’s Word, God’s Creation, God’s People

Hayes didn’t always enjoy camp. Once in grade nine or ten, he was having, as he put it mildly, a “stupendously horrible time.” He wasn’t getting along with his cabin, he was shy, and he was miserable. Then came the evening service. “One night, listening to a sermon—it’s the closest thing to a miracle I’ve seen—because everything just changed.” Whatever was said in that sermon, clicked. His week changed as his heart did, and some of the friendships that resulted last until today. These experiences at French Creek, he said, made Christianity real to him, instead of just “these are the dos and don’ts of how to behave as a Christian.”

Before the first week of camp, along with the pots and pans and mattresses and boxes of hymnals, the opening crew also unpacks a giant wooden logo that they hang in the mess hall. It reads: “French Creek Bible Conference: God’s Word, God’s Creation, God’s People.”

For better or for worse, during a week at French Creek, campers experience those three with an immediacy and an intensity that, as Hayes said, makes things real. There are two sessions of morning instruction, plus worship at night and cabin devotions. There are bugs, bats, thunderstorms, and sunrises. And there are cabinmates and counselors in close, quite close, proximity.

Add to that the few distractions French Creek Bible Conference has to offer. No phones are allowed, not even for most counselors. And there’s even less to “do” than when he was a kid, Hayes said. The small lake is now unswimmable, and the one-mile hike to the pool is typically prohibitive. There is tetherball, box hockey, pickup basketball, and round-robin ping-pong.

Yet many of the campers thrive, and keep coming back. “The fact that French Creek is such a pared-down experience emphasizes relational development,” Schnitzel said. “I think it really provides an opportunity for kids to wrestle through the things of faith and life. French Creek has been a really big encouragement for people’s faith for a long time.”

Chris Walmer, son of Buzz Walmer, who came each year he could as a camper, remembers late night discussions in the kitchen. “I think I learned my theology listening in the kitchen to guys like Tom Tyson and Dick Gaffin and David Clowney and George Marsden.”

Two generations later, the theological discussions seem to happen during porch time at 6:30 a.m. instead of late night in the kitchen. But the sentiment is the same.

“Kids who are thoroughly churched get to be themselves for a week, out amongst kids who are also being themselves,” is how Fillebrown put it.

 “It’s a place in which what you’re supposed to do seems to be what you want to do,” Doug Watson remembered from his years of service. “When it’s time for meeting, we didn’t have to drag kids into meeting. They’re there.”

Schnitzel is aware that they are continuing something precious that others had the foresight to begin, and to foster: “I want to say thank you to all the people who donated their time and energy to create this experience for me, and what a blessing it is to do that for the kids who are coming up,” she said. “We get to continue the work of our parents, we get to continue the work of our mentors, and it’s the Lord’s work.”

The author is managing editor of New Horizons. New Horizons, May 2025.