Fifty-eight summers
A borrowed field, two canoes, and eleven boys from one church.
That was 1968. The field is ours now and there are eighteen cabins on it, but the shape of the week has hardly changed.
How it started
A youth pastor named Dale Rensink borrowed a farmer's field on the north shore of Fish Lake for six days in July 1968 and took eleven boys camping. They cooked on a fire, swam off a rock, and read the gospel of Mark in the evenings. The next year there were forty children and a rented marquee.
The camp bought the land outright in 1979 with money raised across nine congregations. Peace of Christ has been an independent non-profit since, run by a volunteer board and a small year-round staff.
The property
Eighty-four acres of mixed pine and birch with about two thousand feet of shoreline. Eighteen cabins in two rows, a dining hall built in 1984 and re-roofed in 2019, a nurse's station, a craft shed and woodshop, an archery range, a climbing wall put up in 2011, and a chapel clearing that is a ring of stumps under the trees.
The trailhead at the east end joins seven and a half miles of ridge path. Most of it we maintain ourselves, with campers.
What hasn't changed
Cabin groups of eight. No screens. The fire ring on the last night, where campers who want to say something get to say it. The same wooden spoon awarded for the tidiest cabin since 1972, now on its fourth handle.
Four of our current staff were campers here. Two were campers whose parents were campers.
Our faith, stated plainly
Christian in conviction, open in practice.
Peace of Christ Camp is a Christian camp. That is why it exists, and we would rather you knew exactly what that means before you fill in a form.
Campers of any background or none are welcome, and always have been. Chapel in the clearing and small groups by cabin are part of the week, the same way meals and swimming are — every camper comes along. Nobody is asked to pray aloud, sign anything, come to the front, or make a decision. No one is singled out for not joining in, and staff do not report back to us on what a child believes.
Questions and doubt are treated as normal parts of faith rather than problems to be fixed. When a camper asks whether God is real, or why their grandmother died, the counselor's job is to take it seriously and answer honestly — including saying they do not know. That is the whole point of the fire ring.
We are an independent camp, not the arm of any single denomination, and campers come from Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox and unchurched families. If you would like to read our statement of faith in full, or talk it through with a director first, ask and we will send it.
Staff & counselors
the people who will know your kid's name by Monday lunchtime
Ruth
Camp Director · Thunder Bay
Nineteenth season. Reads every scholarship form herself.
Marcus
Program Director · Sudbury
Teaches the climbing wall, makes the worst pancakes on staff.
Jo
Waterfront Lead · Kingston
Head lifeguard. Can name every canoe and holds a grudge against one of them.
Anne
Camp Nurse · Peterborough
Twelve summers. Keeps a jar of sweets for campers who take pills badly.
Danny
Kitchen Manager · Barrie
Runs a nut-free kitchen and takes dietary requests as a personal challenge.
Sam
Trail & Maintenance · lives on site
Was a camper in 1994. Cuts the ridge path every spring, mostly alone.
Summer counselors are hired each spring, mostly university students, many of them former campers and LITs. All are background-checked and complete a week of training before campers arrive.
Board & governance
A volunteer board of nine meets four times a year: three parents of former campers, two ministers, an accountant, a lawyer, a paediatric nurse, and one alumni representative under twenty-five. No board member is paid.
Accounts are independently audited each year and the audited statement and annual report are posted here every November. The board's safeguarding subcommittee reviews every incident report from the season.
Service projects
Trail and shoreline. Every session spends a morning on the ridge path or clearing the shoreline. Campers do the work; it is not a demonstration.
Firewood drive. Each October LITs and volunteers cut, split and deliver eighty cords to older households in the township.
Partner-camp fund. A tenth of every donation goes to two smaller camps we have worked with for years, one of them across the border.
Support the camp
Tuition covers roughly three-quarters of what a week costs. Donations cover the rest and the whole of the No camper turned away fund.
Work weekends — two in May, one in September. Bring tools, sleep in a cabin, eat well.
Alumni — the register goes back to 1968 and the reunion is the Saturday of Family Weekend.