Peter Kim
Senior Pastor
Trinity Covenant Church
Family Camp rescued me. Yes, it really did. Not just myself, but my entire family as well. You see, in December of 2017, my family accepted a call to serve as the new senior pastor of Trinity Covenant Church in Manchester, CT. We made the difficult decision to uproot ourselves from our entire extended family, the neighborhood where we were raising our three children, and our beloved church community that I had planted and was pastoring at the time in suburban Chicago. Making a cross-country move with a young family was indeed a very difficult decision. It was during those early few months that Pilgrim Pines Executive Director Jim Condap reached out to me and invited me to speak at Family Camp. Jim reassured me that it would be a great opportunity for our entire family to not only minister but also find some R&R amid a busy ministry life. He couldn’t have been more right about that.
So how did Family Camp rescue me? First of all, being so new to the East Coast Conference, Pilgrim Pines, and our new church I was struggling with anxiety and insecurities as the “new” pastor in town taking the reins of a nearly hundred and thirty-year-old church. It was through the Family Camp experience in sharing God’s Word and ministering to the wonderful families in attendance that week that was truly life-giving and reaffirmed my calling and more importantly our decision to make the big move to the East Coast. Secondly, it gave our family a chance to enjoy one another and reconnect as a family as we had been running at an unsustainable pace, especially during our first year at the new church. We needed this time far more than we realized.
Finally, as we have made it back for Family Camp nearly each year our kids have now grown up looking forward to Family Camp each summer and have even invited their cousins from Chicago and California to join us for the week.
Family Camp has now become a Kim family tradition as it has for so many other families for generations that call Pilgrim Pines their home away from home. With each passing year, our love, appreciation, and life-long memories being formed for our children are particularly precious, not only as out-of-state transplants but also as children and grandchildren of Korean immigrants who long for a physical place to call home. Pilgrim Pines has become that place for us in our family’s story, where lifelong memories are created and cherished. It is for these reasons that Family Camp has indeed rescued me and my family!