Camp Joshua a Model for Other States to Follow: Pro-Life Retreat Educates and Energizes Oregon Teens.

You could call it a pro-life boot camp for teens, if it weren't so fun. Days start at six in the morning and are packed until lights out at eleven. The three days are filled with field trips, pro-life games, and educational seminars and end with teens sleeping on bunk beds near people who start as strangers and end as friends. This is Camp Joshua.

For the past five years, Oregon Right to Life Educational Foundation (ORTLEF) has put on Camp Joshua for 16- to 21-year-old youth over their Spring Break. The teens come from all over Oregon to a retreat center just outside of the state capital and spend three days immersed in information about the nuts and bolts of the life issues. They also receive practical knowledge about how the government works, their role in and the history of the right-to-life movement, and how to start and what to do with a Teens for Life group.

According to the camp's director, Kate Ewald, "Camp Joshua is a leadership camp, so its name came from Deuteronomy 30:19 [NIV]: As Moses passed the mantle of leadership to Joshua, he said, "This day ... I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life, so that you and your children may live.'" Ewald continued, "The mission statement is: 'To train and equip pro-life youth to influence their peers today and become the pro-life leaders of tomorrow.'" (Even though they are actually pro-life leaders now!)

The training students receive in the seminars is reinforced by field trips to places where promoting the right to life is a way of life, including the Oregon Right to Life offices in Salem, a Portland pregnancy center, and a home for unwed mothers. They also meet with pro-life leaders in the state House and Senate and lobby their own elected representatives.

The pool of talent ORTLEF has recruited to conduct seminars is phenomenal. The experts' presentations on stem cell research, physician-assisted suicide (which is legal in Oregon), abortion techniques, and fetal development are clinical, precise, and moving. Dr. Ken Wilson, president of Oregon Right to Life and a world-renowned surgeon, gives one of the most popular talks on the Biblical basis for being pro-life and the Christian responsibility to vote. Certainly the most emotional seminar is the one each year where post-abortive women and men share their stories of abortion and healing.

Following each seminar, several teens are randomly chosen to give "table talks," impromptu speeches reacting to the presentation just offered. Not only do they practice speaking off the top of their heads, but table talks give them practice in public speaking and help them become more comfortable talking about ...