Fifteen Years of English Camps

It all began in 2010 with the ASCLA-East Formators’ Meeting in Indonesia, which led to the biennial English Camp in Indonesia starting in 2011 as well as in the college seminary in the Philippines until before the pandemic years. The work also brought me to Sri Lanka for English programs for the students in formation and teachers’ training programs for formators. In 2023, I resumed facilitating the annual English Camp in the Philippines, but after 15 years, it is now the time to pass on this task to them.

The camp has never been about English alone. It is about a way of living together across cultures—a way of listening, of speaking and being understood. The ten seminarian facilitators will return to their regular classes carrying the quiet confidence that they can lead, not because they have mastered a technique, but because they have accompanied others and found themselves accompanied by God in the process. The camp ends, but the friendships and the confidence born here continue outward into the ordinary days of formation that follow. And I, at the side, am learning my own new lesson: that the truest fruit of any work comes when it no longer needs you, when it has been given away completely, held in other hands, spoken in other voices, and trusted to the Spirit who breathes where he wills.