Summer’s Best Two Weeks is a transformative camp experience for grades K-8th to introduce kids to a variety of sports, develop their skills, and teach them to honor God and one another in the way they compete in sports and all of life. It is one of the community outreach ministries of Resurrection, impacting far more than just our local Red Mill community. Resurrection directly hosts “our” camp in Red Mill, but also coordinates and facilitates camps throughout Hampton Roads, bringing a great camp experience to hundreds of kids as well as ministry and leadership development for dozens of teen and young adult counselors. To learn more about Resurrection as a church community, visit our welcome page

THE POINT

Competition brings out the worst in many of us, kids and adults alike. We can quickly become self-centered, angry, and unreasonable. Many of us may have been told or have told our kids or others to "just be a little less competitive."  But competitiveness is woven into the fabric of our very nature. What if there was a better way? What if our competitiveness was re-directed to honor God in all of our efforts and to care more about others than ourselves?  SB2W uses sports to train kids at how to win and lose, succeed and fail, in a way that honors God and respects others, following the motto: "God first, others second, I'm third."

THE STORY

Summer's Best Two Weeks is a camp program that began in 1966. It still operates primarily as a resident camp in Western PA, serving over 3,000 campers every summer. But it has also spawned a number of day camps operated by individual churches in New York, Pennsylvania, and Virginia.

Jimmy Brock (now the Pastor of Resurrection Community Church) grew up going to both the Day Camp at The Falls Church in Falls Church, VA and the Resident Camp in PA. He then worked as a counselor at the day camps, where he first met his wife Suzanne, who was a fellow counselor. In 2015, they started a new SB2W camp in Atlanta, GA and in 2018 brought this camp program to Virginia Beach. In 2018 and 2019, in partnership with Crosswater Presbyterian, a one-week version of camp ran as part of the Princess Anne Mission, the effort to plant a new church in southern Virginia Beach that launched Resurrection in September 2019. In 2021, Resurrection’s Virginia Beach camp expanded to two weeks and a new location started at Grace Chesapeake. In 2022, Alejandro Romero came on staff at Resurrection as part of the Kingdom Expansion project, making it possible to start locations in Kempsville and Indian River, and opening the door for even more locations in 2023 and beyond.

THE ACTIVITIES

SB2W features a wide variety of sports, including football, basketball, soccer, hockey, ultimate Frisbee, kickball, wrestling, tumbling, crafts, trampoline, and swimming. Each day, campers will learn the basics and develop skills in some of these sports, have an interactive Bible lesson on some aspect of Christian competition, and compete as a team in one of the sports. Campers are assigned to squads divided by age and gender to learn their sports and develop their skills, and they are assigned to one of two teams, Romans (red) and Galatians (blue) for team competition. These team assignments are made for life in all SB2W camps and all family members are assigned to the same team so that campers develop a strong sense of team loyalty and identity while learning to respect and honor their opponents. In two-week terms, full-day campers also have the opportunity to participate in an overnight camping trip and compete in a track meet and swim meet.