One of the highlights of Montreat Conference Center’s year-round programs is the summer worship series in which leading preachers from across the country join with visual and performing art professionals and volunteers in a service of worship open to the surrounding community.
For diehard fans of acronyms—of which Presbyterians surely have more than their fair share—the Rev. David Gill has mined something of a GEM. Gill, who will retire on January 31 as executive director of Ferncliff Camp and Conference Center, says that throughout his 20-year tenure at the PC(USA)-related camp he has always “looked for things that can be financially self-sustaining for the long haul.”
As of January 1, 2017, the Ghost Ranch Education & Retreat Center has transferred its operations from the Presbyterian Mission Agency (PMA) of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) to the National Ghost Ranch Foundation (NGRF). The NGRF, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation established in 1972 exclusively to support Ghost Ranch as a ministry of the PC(USA), has been providing financial, operational and volunteer resources for Ghost Ranch.
The Presbyterian Mission Agency Board (PMAB), gathered as the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) A Corporation, met this afternoon to vote on Tony De La Rosa’s contract extension as PMA interim executive director and finalize details of the transfer of Ghost Ranch Education and Retreat Center to the National Ghost Ranch Foundation (NGRF).
As Christy Foster stood on a hillside overlooking the Guadalupe River at the Presbyterian Mo-Ranch Assembly, she remembered all at once just how much—and for how long—she had wanted to be in camp and conference ministry.
The action required to transfer the operations of the Ghost Ranch Conference & Education Center from the Presbyterian Mission Agency (PMA) to the National Ghost Ranch Foundation (NGRF), was approved today by the Presbyterian Mission Agency Board (PMAB).
Rocking peacefully on a porch at Ferncliff Camp and Conference Center—a broad smile across his face—it is impossible to imagine Peter Newbury as the “angry kid” who says that he went to camp at his parents’ insistence against his will.
If camps are famous as places for roughing it, the tablecloths were an unexpected amenity. “Because you are here at camp, there are tablecloths,” said Doug Walters, Camp Hanover’s executive director, to a dining hall filled with delighted laughter. “There are no tablecloths here in summer.”
