Fellowship history · The campground amphitheater

The borrowed bowl of benches we played when the church could spare it.

Before there was a fire we would not leave until we had twenty-two songs, there was an amphitheater we were only ever lent. It sat in a fold of pines up at a camp the church association ran — a wooden bowl of benches stepped down a hillside to a plank stage, open to the weather and roofed only by branches — and it was never ours. It belonged to the camp, and the camp belonged to the church calendar, and the church calendar did not, as a rule, have Water2Fine near the top of it. So we played there the way you play a room you have been lent: gratefully, briefly, and only when the room could spare us. When a men's retreat cleared out on a Sunday afternoon, or a week of vacation Bible school folded its tables early, someone would telephone Pastor Connie to say the amphitheater was free until dark if we wanted it — and we wanted it, and we went. We loaded the minivan, drove up the grade, and set four folding chairs on a stage built for a hundred that was, for a few borrowed hours, ours. There we learned the thing an outdoor room teaches that a lobby cannot: that open air does not want to be filled, only joined. Push a hymn at the trees and the trees simply let it go; sing under the pines instead of over them and a dozen folks on the top benches will hear a whispered verse they would have missed if you had shouted it. So up there we played softer, not louder, and the mountain kept the sound better than any wall we knew.

• ✚Only when the room could spare us — We never once asked the camp to move a thing on our account. The amphitheater was the church's before it was ever, briefly, the band's, and if a retreat wanted it or a Bible school ran late, we waited, or we did not go at all. A room you are lent is a kindness, not a booking, and the surest way to lose a kindness is to start treating it like a right. We treated it like a kindness for years, and for years the phone kept ringing to say it was free until dark.
• ✚An open sky is joined, not filled — Sister Petra called it finding the note the hillside will carry. Indoors you learn to play under a ceiling; outdoors there is no ceiling, only pines and wind and, one memorable Sunday, a woodpecker who kept better time than the rest of us. An open sky will not hold a shout, so we stopped shouting. We found the soft place the hill wanted and sat down under it, and discovered that a leaned-in whisper does more work outdoors than a big sound ever could — because leaning in is already half of worship.
• ✚The benches, and then the fire — The camp has a name you may already know, because the fellowship never quite left it: Camp Pinecrest, up the mountain at Lake Arrowhead. Years after those borrowed afternoons on the benches, we came back — not to the wooden bowl this time but to a clearing with a fire ring in it — and stayed around the coals until we had a whole record. That is Camp Songs, Vol. 1 (2014), caught live around the fire in a single weekend, in the friendliest key we knew. The amphitheater did not make that album; a fire did. But it is where we first learned to trust an open sky with a hymn, and you do not get a fire record out of people who never learned to sing outdoors.
• ✚Leave it a shade better — We swept the plank stage, folded our chairs, and carried out more than we carried in: a stray hymnal, whatever the last picnic had left under a bench, the pinecones the little ones had lined up along the lip of the stage. You leave a lent room a shade better than you found it; that is simply the rent on a kindness. We paid it gladly, every borrowed afternoon, and we would pay it again tomorrow if the phone rang to say the amphitheater was free until dark.

One of the venue-less years' many borrowed rooms — the one that turned, in time, into a mountain we keep going back to. Fellowship in song since 2007. Play the room you are lent, and bring a folding chair.