Report on Hilltop CFO 2001 Youth Training Program

by Lisa LaLonde

In July 2001, I had the privilege of attending the Hilltop CFO Youth Leadership Training Program at the Black Rock Retreat Center in Quarryville, PA. There were over 60 participants in the Youth Training program, which boosted the camp’s overall attendance to over 150 people of all ages. The experience was in addition to the normal rigors of a CFO week, with Colonel Bo Bottomly as a speaking leader as well as in charge of the training program. The participants in the training program ranged in age from ten on up to adults. We were divided up into teams early in the week, but also functioned as a larger group. We were expected to arrive on time to every 7:30am morning meditation and sit in the front on the floor. We were expected to attend every talk, to sit together in the front, and to listen and take notes. We were encouraged to embrace the training as True “Athletes of the Spirit” that Glenn Clark envisioned. . We were expected to be joyful participants in the full CFO day! This may have seemed like a military discipline to some, but it provided the essential framework for the critical bonding and healing that can happen at CFO.

During the week, I was puzzled by one thing. This was not really a “training program” in the corporate sense of the word. We were not fed a program to try at our home camps. What we were asked to do was to fully experience a CFO week. It just so happened we experienced it in Youth surroundings. What made this different from any other CFO week?

Even after the experience, I still couldn’t figure out why it “worked.” Why there was incredible bonding. Joy abundant. Youth’s lives changed. Incredible sharing and prayer times. Relationships that would be life-long. I had taken pages of notes, but they were more about what we are supposed to be like as CFOers than what we are supposed to plan out for our youth. Bo had said “A Youth Leader Course is not clever tricks, but it’s who you are and who you represent.” He reminded us that we represent the power that created the universe. Our emphasis should be on personal integrity and unselfishness. People follow and long to be like people of integrity and influence. Integrity means “I’m just what you see.” Unselfishness means “what’s mine is yours as well.” Our week was filled with wisdom like this dropped into our CFO experience.

It wasn’t until a discussion at the Zone 4 Spring retreat recently that I figured it out. In fact, it all came together in a moment of clarity that felt distinctly like revelation from above! The reason the Youth Training Program was so incredible was because all involved wanted to be trained as athletes of the spirit. Every last one of the trainees bought into the training 100%. They were there for a purpose and were determined to find their God-experience and to get their training. And if there were a few here and there who just stumbled into the experience, it didn’t take long for the enthusiasm of the rest of the group to infect them as well.

Bo set forward some of the goals of any Youth program: teamwork, overcoming fears, communication, encouraging each other, working together for good, and letting all gifts out in the open. He said this is life training because all of our lives we get onto a team and fit into a team.. In a team, there is always an objective you move towards. You let everyone know what your gifts are, and pretty soon everyone wants you on the team because you are a good team player. Once you join a team, you help to push it up the mountain. Bo stressed that the younger set (age 11-12) should be included in “youth” programs because that time of life represents a most important turning point. It’s when a young person decides to be a rebel or join the team. The plan for Youth programs should include ways to encourage young people to come back to CFO as adults. It doesn’t stop at a Youth plan, it’s a life CFO plan. As Bo shared his heart on all these life points, I began to realize that they were not unique to a youth program at all. In fact, I saw that the rest of the camp was watching in amazement as this “youth experiment” was happening in their midst. I wondered if they weren’t in some kind of awe of what was happening. . .like watching a moment in history. We all had this sense of being involved in something bigger than ourselves. In fact, one of the participants related that the Lord had told him to look around at the youth and take note of them. The Lord told him that you might think these are just youth, but these are the world shakers of tomorrow. Politicians. Doctors. Financiers. It was not a general prophecy but a specific one. These people here in this room will change the world. That was a refining moment for me, too. I was involved in a great big God project that felt like a giant wave. Somehow I knew even then I didn’t understand it all.

Bo said early on in the week, “I’m nearly 100 years old, if there’s anyone who shouldn’t be a youth leader, it’s me.” I feel some of that wonder. God is always asking us to do things that are beyond our experience. That is the summary for me of the Hilltop CFO Youth Training program. All these people were asked to be part of something new and radical and very future-oriented. I feel that we will be riding this wave into the future of CFO and that CFO will never be the same.

© 2002 Cincogatos Productions
Published in the CFO Fellowship Messenger April 2002
Also published in Camps Farthest Out: The Journey: Past, Present and Future: Celebrating 75 Years of Living Prayer. Austin MN: Macalester Park Publishing, © 2005