Tim and Helen Healy of Holy Name of Jesus in Medina have a passion for youth ministry. It runs deep, going back to their two years of service to West St. Paul-based NET Ministries in the late 1980s.
It’s why they stepped forward to try and find a permanent home for Extreme Faith Camp, which has provided weeklong summer camps for youth in the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis since 2001. Camp leaders rented various sites to put on up to four weeklong camps per year, and they decided three years ago it was time to start looking for a place to call home. Tim and Helen Healy joined that effort.
One of the first places they visited was a 700-acre resort near Trego, Wisconsin, about two hours northeast of the Twin Cities. At the time, it was a beautiful resort that would more than meet the needs of camp.
After looking at numerous other sites throughout Minnesota and Wisconsin, they ended up back at the Trego property, which they named Trinity Woods Catholic Retreat Center, which is owned by a nonprofit Tim and Helen Healy helped create called Minnesota Catholic Youth Partnership. Tim is the president of the board of directors.
Helen calls the effort to secure a permanent home for EFC a “great success story” and notes that attendance went from 900 campers and leaders over four weeks last year to 2,000 over seven weeks this year, a record number. This year, over 70 parishes sent kids to camp, and the Healys, who live at the camp during the summer and work for it year-round, are pushing to boost numbers even more. With 700 acres to work with, including a private lake and a river on one end of the property, there is plenty of room to grow.
Christ at the center
Since its beginning, the center of camp has been the Eucharist. There is Mass every day of camp, an adoration chapel where boys and girls going into 10th grade (called the prayer team) pray throughout the week for camp and campers, and, finally, a special session on Wednesday evening in which a priest walks up and down rows of campers and leaders with the Eucharist in a monstrance, stopping in front of each person to offer a brief moment for personal adoration before the Blessed Sacrament.
Helen Healy, whose brother is Bishop Andrew Cozzens of Crookston, chair of the National Eucharistic Revival, watches the two-hour adoration session every week and sees a roomful of youth kneeling before Christ and experiencing the love of God, maybe for the first time in their lives.
“It’s just indescribable,” said Helen, noting that three of her and Tim’s seven children were at camp this summer. “That’s really the climax of the camp, when Jesus is in the Eucharist in the monstrance, and young people encounter him very close. They’re able to tell God they love him, in a personal way. It’s just very meaningful.”
It can also be transformative. Trevor Thorp, 20, of St. Michael in St. Michael, started going to Extreme Faith Camp the summer after he completed sixth grade, which is the first year of eligibility. He has come back all but one year since, and this year is on Trinity Wood’s summer staff called the Trinity Team, which is made up of young adults who live at camp and serve at all seven sessions. The other group at camp is the Extreme Team, which is made up of youth who have just finished grades 10, 11 and 12 and help provide discipleship in faith to the campers.
“In sixth grade, I had an encounter with Jesus at Extreme Faith Camp, and that really kick-started my faith,” said Thorp, who will be entering his junior year at St. John Vianney College Seminary in St. Paul. “And every year since, I’ve just always wanted to come back because I know how powerful of an experience it is. And then, as a leader, knowing what it could do for the middle schoolers, I wanted to be able to come and help middle schoolers have that same experience.”
That, in a nutshell, is what Extreme Faith Camp is all about: having a personal encounter with Christ and then coming back to help others have it, too. In this way, it becomes part of youth ministry overall at parishes in the archdiocese.
Helping parish ministry
John O’Sullivan has seen this pattern continue over several decades. He spent more than 30 years in parish youth ministry, 19 of them at St. Michael in St. Michael, and is one of the founders of Extreme Faith Camp. He left St. Michael recently to accept a full-time role at Trinity Woods Catholic Retreat Center to help support EFC.
“I work here as a parish liaison to assist parishes in preparing for camp, but even more importantly, to help them understand what the bigger vision of EFC is, because it’s not just a summer camp,” he said. “It brings renewal (to a parish). That’s the revival that I see coming from a one-week experience (at EFC). An encounter with the Lord is not the end, but it’s really the beginning. And it just creates a beautiful cycle of ministry that can grow exponentially.”
That growth has been happening at St. Michael in St. Michael, as shown on a display board in the gathering space of the church that features parishioners who have become priests and religious, and have served or are serving as missionaries, plus those in seminary pursuing the priesthood. Thorp seems headed to having his picture on the board.
“My experience at (SJV) has been very, very powerful for me,” Thorp said. “I would be surprised if God called me away from the priesthood at this point.”
He said he had several options for activities he could pursue this summer, but chose to be on the Trinity Team at Trinity Woods. “I wanted to be a missionary because bringing people to Jesus is important to me,” he said.
His thoughts were echoed by two others on this year’s Trinity Team, Francis Denton of St. John the Baptist in New Brighton, and Brynn Patton, a parishioner along with Thorp at St. Michael. Like Thorp, Patton has been going to EFC since sixth grade, with plans to serve in NET Ministries this fall. She called her camp experience “very amazing,” and noted that she and Thorp have served together on the parish’s core team, which serves those in middle school. Denton, who has been coming to camp since eighth grade, said, “This is the most clearly I’ve seen the Holy Spirit work in my entire life.”
St. Michael in St. Michael has been sending people to EFC for many years because of O’Sullivan’s work as the parish youth minister. Now, other parishes are catching the fire, like St. Michael in Prior Lake. The high school youth minister there, Katie Kelly, came to Extreme Faith Camp with a group of 25 during the sixth week (July 22 to 26) and was a camp co-leader with Amy Schroeder, director of youth formation at Mary, Mother of the Church in Burnsville. Those two parishes, along with the other 10 parishes that came that week, were new to Extreme Faith Camp.
“The location is really wonderful,” said Kelly, 30. “Personally, I love that it’s really family friendly. I was able to come with my 5-month-old son (Finnegan) and my husband (John), and we were able to participate fully while still being able to be a family, which is just such a blessing.”
Kelly’s experience hints at the future vision for Trinity Woods, which Tim Healy said goes beyond Extreme Faith Camp.
Future growth
“There’s so much more that Trinity Woods Catholic Retreat Center will be able to offer the diocese, and that’s what we’re excited about,” he said. “Extreme Faith Camp is obviously the cornerstone of who we’re serving. But, we feel there’s a lot of opportunities to reach other high school youth groups, confirmation groups, and even adult retreats, men’s (and) women’s marriage retreats.”
The number of buildings on the property, including four-bedroom duplexes, cottages, small houses and lodges make the possibilities for housing groups of various sizes almost endless, Healy said. Already, Trinity Woods is hosting two family camps this summer, with plans to add more next year. There’s also talk of starting outdoor education programs for Catholic schools, in which students come to Trinity Woods for instruction. O’Sullivan’s daughter, Teresa, who was hired as a full-time permanent employee and served as activities director at EFC this summer, has a college degree in outdoor education and is eager to put it to use.
The number of people the buildings can accommodate “is just mind blowing,” Healy said. “We haven’t even come close to filling (all the space at one time). I think the fullest we were (for one week of camp) was 315. Yeah, that was pretty full. But our total beds are 450.”
The excitement for Trinity Woods and EFC is felt by Archbishop Bernard Hebda, who came in May to bless the camp and was scheduled to come up again for a closing Mass Aug. 2. Other priests have come up to camp throughout the seven sessions, including several who were just ordained in May. There’s also Deacon Tom Michaud, who serves on the board of the Minnesota Catholic Youth Partnership and was at camp for week six with his parish, St. Joseph in West St. Paul. It was his 11th time.
“This is the year I can finally say all five of my kids have been to Extreme Faith Camp,” said Deacon Michaud, who noted his youngest child, Joseph, attended for the first time. “I talk with so many people, like parents, and they ask, ‘Why are my kids not staying in church? Why don’t they want to keep going to church? Why are they leaving the Church?’
“I’d hear that a lot. And then I showed up at Extreme Faith Camp, and I saw the Church come alive in front of me. I saw the Church, through the kids, just come alive. And I was so blown away.”
The effects are evident in the Michaud household.
“Our kids going through Extreme Faith Camp has changed the family,” said Deacon Michaud. “I watched their faith go … from their head to their heart, and they felt God’s love.”
And, when Deacon Michaud asks them about the best part of camp, they all say the same thing: Wednesday night adoration.
“It’s amazing and a blessing to be able to watch the kids look up and see the monstrance in their face and how it just touches them,” he said. “It’s absolutely amazing.”
Now that Extreme Faith Camp finally has a home, Tim and Helen Healy, camp leaders, parents and people like Deacon Michaud think it will only get better.
“It had to be the Holy Spirit guiding us here (to Trinity Woods),” the deacon said. “I’ve never seen a camp like this, ever. … It’s beautiful. It’s well maintained. You come up here and you can’t help but just breathe deep and go: ‘Wow. This is God’s country.’”
For more information or to donate, visit trinitywoodscatholic.com.
