Copyright © 2007 The Episcopal Diocese of East Tennessee

Photo by Penney Koeppen From left, MacKenzie Hardt, summer camp waterfront director, and Kellan Gibson, arts and crafts director, hang a parish banner from Thankful Memorial, Chattanooga, in the Commons Building at Grace Point, the diocesan camp and retreat center. Each parish and worshiping community in the diocese has been asked to express the spirit of their church in a banner, and all the banners will hang at Grace Point.

Camp staffers hang first of parish banners in Commons

By Penney Koeppen

Two days before the first summer camp session at Grace Point, spirits were high among incoming staff during a counselor training session on June 3.

Led by the camp’s new executive director, Christopher Turner, one of the staff’s first tasks was to hang eight colorful canvas banners in the freshly renovated Commons Building.

These eight banners represent the first of 50 planned, one from each parish in the diocese.

Members of each parish have been asked to design a banner that visually represents the spirit, unique gifts and special ministries of their faith community.

Banners on display so far are from Thankful Memorial, Chattanooga; St. Francis of Assisi, Ooltewah; St. Paul, Athens; Trinity, Gatlinburg; St. Joseph the Carpenter, Sevierville; St. Stephen, Oak Ridge; St. Thomas, Elizabethton; and St. Peter, Chattanooga.

The driving force behind the banner ministry is St. Andrew, Maryville, parishioner and area artist RaRa Schlitt.

“This is just a very special ministry for me to be involved in,” she said.

She credits her son, Thomas, with the original idea for the parish banners at Grace Point. Once a camp lifeguard and landscape staff member, Thomas ended a camp season with the thought that Grace Point needed some form of representation from each of the parishes in the diocese; he thought his mother, with her artistic talents, might be able to help.

As the idea took shape, Bishop Charles vonRosenberg and the former executive director of Grace Point, the Rev. “Bo” Lewis, encouraged RaRa and gave the project their enthusiastic blessing.

She sought donations for all the necessary materials, such as the poles, the hardware and the canvas. A friend, Joan Lyndon, volunteered to help sew the edges of each canvas before the fabric was sent out to each church.

According to Schlitt, this special project will enable Grace Point summer campers – and others who use the Commons Building – to appreciate the scope and size of the diocese. She said she believes the banners also will introduce campers to the talents and interests of other parishes. And she has said additional banners may join those of the churches: Episcopal schools, jubilee centers, perhaps one to interpret the spirit of the diocese as a whole.

Slowly but surely, the finished church banners are coming in. Often, a banner is blessed by church clergy before it is formally presented to Schlitt, who delivers it personally to Grace Point.

Overall, the banners bring the spirit of each parish to Grace Point – that special place on Watts Barr Lake that Bishop vonRosenberg has called the “living room” of the diocese.

To learn more about this project, please contact RaRa Schlitt, 865-414-2325 or RaRaSchlitt005@aol.com.

Drinking in Creation from a shady, breezy porch

Photo by Katie Ann Twiggs Summer campers love to hang out on the newest porch at Grace Point: the one that runs the full length of the Commons Building and looks out on the lakeshore. It was made possible through the generosity of JoAnn Yates.

By Katie Ann Twiggs and Mike Keene

When the Episcopal Diocese of East Tennessee first bought Grace Point, one of the striking things about it was the absence of outdoor places to sit. Those first few years, it became common to see folks carrying their own fold-up camp chairs with them at events like Diocesan Day or at worship services on the Point.

About the only place that even approximated being outside and had chairs was the big screened-in porch on the back of the Retreat House. That porch overlooks the pool and has a great view, stretching from the top of Hurricane Ridge out across Watts Bar Lake. Since the porch faces east, it’s a classic spot for early risers to sit and sip their coffee and watch the sun come up. There’s usually a pair of binoculars out there, so in the summer you can watch the ospreys on their nests out in the lake. If you watch closely early in the morning, you can usually see a bald eagle or two fly by down below the crest of the ridge. (That great porch and its sitting space are still there, and we’re working on a plan to add even more rocking chairs to it.)

Below the porch on the back of the main floor of the Retreat House, there’s one of our great hidden porches. This is the porch swing at poolside, actually hidden underneath the main porch. Especially if you’re supervising toddlers in the pool area, that swing is a great spot. But unless someone points it out to you, you may never know it’s there. (When you’re sitting on the overhead porch, if you hear a kind of grung-grung-grung sound from under your feet, it’s probably someone swinging on the lower porch, taking in the breeze.)

Another hidden porch-like spot is the gazebo just across the pool from the Retreat House. It’s a great, semi-private spot to sit and have some quiet time, either by yourself or with a friend or two, especially in the fall and spring (in the summer, the insect coefficient can be a little high under the wisteria vine).

Again, chances are that if you’re fairly quiet, no one will know you’re there. You’ll also have a great view across Watts Bar Lake.

The only other porch folks could use very much when we first bought the site is the old one on the end of the Commons Building closest to the lake. If you were to look at Grace Point Summer Camp pictures from any of the past five years, chances are half of them will have been taken on or from that porch. It’s there that everybody waited for each meal to start, where the counselors would gather after hours to compare notes and make plans for the next day, where millions of monkey’s fist knots and Josephine bracelets and friendship bracelets and bowlines have been nearly tied, untied and retied.

Other than Nurse Vivian’s reserved seat, the only chairs out there were either people’s private folding camp chairs or those molded plastic chairs that have become ubiquitous, even in restaurants. They’re great, inexpensive and durable, and we use lots of them at Grace Point, but they’re not really all that comfortable for serious porch sitting.

Right above the “old” Commons Building porch is another porch, one with an equally good view of the lake. It’s smaller, but it’s a great place to read a book on a day that isn’t too hot.

Across the road from the Commons are the two “wing” porches on the sides of the Art Barn/Craft Shop. If there’s not a boat parked underneath, they provide good spots to do messy art projects, like finger painting or tie-dying or making a banana split for 30 people to eat without using their hands.

And just down toward the lake from those wing porches is the old gazebo, a great place to have a combination hamburger cookout and evening prayer service for up to 24 people. It’s out of the way of the main flow of people, and it’s especially nice for rainy day activities.

When the new St. Paul’s Chapel (complete with its own several porches) is built, people will notice the old gazebo more because it’s on the same sloping piece of land. The old gazebo has benches built into its sides, which makes it nice for rainy day worship services as well as hamburger cookouts.

The new porches ...

Let’s start our description of the new porches with the four great porches on the tree houses — those two cabins up in the woods that each will sleep 24 people. The tree houses are across the road from the grassy slopes of Grace Point, literally nestled in the trees. Each tree house has a porch on each end, approximately 10 feet by 16 feet, covered with a roof and equipped with great chairs for sitting.

Since the tree houses are built on a side slope, you can walk in at grade on one side and end up sitting a ways up in the air on the other. Thus there’s always at least a little breeze, and the mosquitoes don’t seem so much of a problem. After sundown, two hours on one of those porches can pass like ten minutes, watching the fireflies and listening to distant thunder across the cove.

As nice as all these Grace Point porches are, they all pale in comparison to the “new” porch on the Commons Building, made possible through the generosity of JoAnn Yates.

Combined with the old porch, this porch gives the Commons 180 degrees of porch on the west and south sides. So there’s always somewhere that’s shaded, and if there’s any breeze anywhere, chances are it’s hitting some part of that huge porch.

Did we say ‘huge’? The new porch is 12 feet from front edge to back wall and something like 85 feet long, completely screened in and roofed. It even has ceiling fans all the way along it.

In Session I of this year’s summer camp, we kept a couple of our big dining tables out there, and the campers ate breakfast and lunch out on the porch nearly every day.

In Session II, the weather was warmer so we ate inside, but everybody at camp, from young master Will (age 10 months) to the oldest of us, spent big parts of our time porch sitting.

What do we do? We rock, we tell stories, we tie knots, we talk and we listen and we listen and we talk, and oh boy, do we sing. This summer, in addition to the traditional “Han Ska Leve,” the kids really love to sit and sing “Sanctuary” (“Lord prepare me / to be a sanctuary”).

The new porch has a great view across the kickball field to the canoe racks, and from there right across the prettiest part of Chamberlain Cove to Bo and Jan Lewis’ new house on the far shore.

As part of the project to build the new porch, Grace Point’s Board of Managers also decided to add an extra door into the end of the Commons nearest the rest rooms, to add four new windows to the porch side – and two to the road side, and to add two wonderful sliding glass doors into the bigger of the two first-floor meeting rooms.

The effect of these new openings into the first floor has to be seen to be believed. The two first-floor rooms, which had been dark and stuffy caves, are now nice places to be, and the growing collection of banners from each parish in the diocese is adding to the light and color in the Commons dining area.

The seating accommodations on the new porch are especially worth noting. We’ve added a couple of dining tables, with their folding metal chairs, it’s true. But we’ve also added four wrought-iron and wood benches, to give us some flexibility.

What’s a porch without a rocker?

Most important, though, the lovely Church of the Resurrection in Loudon has given us twelve new oak rocking chairs. Cal Van Koughnett drove down to Geraldine, Ala., to pick them up, the campers in Session I attached the rockers, and George Dixon has finished them beautifully with linseed oil.

These rocking chairs aren’t fancy ones, but the combination of the size of the porch, the tables, the benches and the rockers makes the ‘new’ porch on the Commons Building maybe even a little bit better place to sit than the porch on the Retreat House.

A thought from Mike ...

Recently one of us (Mike) spent a day on the new porch of the Commons Building doing summer camp paperwork. I was thinking to myself “this must be the very best office in the whole world.”

I’ve been in nice offices – I think of Houghton-Mifflin’s old offices high above Boston, the ones with the floor-to-ceiling windows and views of the Back Bay – and I’m happy to say that what we now have at Grace Point in many ways is better; we have eagles, osprey, cormorants, swallows, nonstop serenades by catbirds, a huge amount of space, rocking chairs, views of East Tennessee hills and the lake, campers, staff, visitors … What could ever be better?

Why don’t you come visit Grace Point and see our porches and other wonderful facilities for yourself?

If you’ve never been, you owe it to yourself to get away for awhile. And if you’ve been before but not lately, come see how we’ve grown!

If you would like a guided tour, call ahead to Christopher Turner, the executive director, at 865-376-0589 or 865-803-8921. You can also find Grace Point on the web at etdiocese.net/gracepoint — and soon, at a new web home. However you choose to “visit” us, we’ll be glad to see you!

Also, if you’d like to join Resurrection, Loudon, in contributing to our “adopt-a-rocker” fund, to purchase more new rocking chairs, Christopher will be glad to explain that program as well. The rockers we have now cost $54 each if we go down to Sand Mountain and pick them up. Any rockers for which your church provides the funds will bear a nice gift acknowledgement on their backs.

Summarized from Joyce Grubb's official minutes

The June 7, 2007, meeting of the Grace Point Board of Managers was held in the Retreat House at Grace Point after members had lunch in the Commons building and an opportunity to see the new porch.

Chapel: John Woody, chair of the Master Planning Committee, reported that the design phase is complete, and specifications are complete.

Fire limits per square foot will limit the chapel to150 seats, and the chancel will be accessible to wheelchairs by an outside ramp.

The project was expected to enter the bid phase in mid-June, with construction starting mid-August and completion slated for next May.

ECCC Conference: Board member Bill Fryar attended the conference of the Episcopal Camp and Conference Centers, and he remarked especially on ideas generated from workshops that focused on achieving excellence and performance and risk management.

Director’s Report: Christopher Turner reported that Grace Point has been a busy place and that the calendar had been filling up with new bookings. With the addition of sleeping quarters given two finished tree houses, for the first time, two groups have been scheduled on the same date later this summer. He also noted the need to develop a cancellation policy; a couple of last-minute cancellations have left the camp unused. A cancellation policy with a stated penalty could have prevented this.

He said he will continue visiting parishes across the diocese to shine a spotlight on Grace Point. He said he has been impressed with summer camp staff and volunteers, and he said volunteers in particular are always welcome. He also reported that a member of St. Paul, Chattanooga has given the camp a sailboat and will deliver it.

Summer Camps: Summer Camp Program Director Mike Keene said the new porch on the Commons “has changed life at Grace Point. The whole thing is fabulous!” He said that Resurrection, Loudon, has donated much-needed rocking chairs.

He discussed staffing needs for the summer camps and said he plans to draw up job descriptions for all program staff and to prepare community covenants for campers and staff.

Publicity and Communications: Jeanne Claire Jones reported that summer camp reminder post cards were sent to former campers with the help of diocesan staff. Mary Berl added that the post cards met with limited success: Only 112 camper applications had been received as of June 7. A newsletter has been sent out with a donation envelope. Alex Haralson is developing a new web home for Grace Point at gracepointcamp.org.

Programs: Land camping activities such as ropes, archery or more arts are being explored. The committee plans a letter to invite vestries to Grace Point for their retreats.

Fund Raising: The committee has discussed plans to ask a select group of prospective donors to come to Grace Point for a special event when the chapel is complete.

Environmental Stewardship: Pat Cahill said the committee plans to have a U.T.C. environmentalist visit. She expects to have more time to devote to this after her retirement the end of July.

Youth: Christopher Turner reported reservations from several parish youth groups.

Other: Mike Keene reminded the board that once the chapel is finished, it will become a popular spot for weddings, and the board should plan how to accommodate these requests.

A Diocesan Day is planned for Sept. 8. Plans include an 11 a.m. eucharist followed by a lunch catered by Frank Moore. Norma Mills, board chair, was to ask the bishop to celebrate.

etdiocese.net/gracepoint — and under development: gracepointcamp.org.

Camp and Retreat Center availability

Did you know anyone may reserve facilities for their use at Grace Point, the camp and retreat center of the Episcopal Diocese of East Tennessee?

In addition to events such as vestry and youth group retreats, Grace Point has hosted study and hobby groups, family weekends and day meetings.

Grace Point overlooks Watts Bar Lake near Kingston, Tenn. Nearly 270 acres of woods, hills, fields and two miles of shoreline offer plenty of space for activities including boating, fishing, swimming, hiking, camping, picnicking, games, sports, reflection, meditation and worship.

Rates are as follows:

• Diocesan/parish groups, day rate: $50 minimum for 10 or fewer guests; $5 for each additional guest. Overnight: $20 per person, per night, with a minimum fee of $160 per group. Full payment is due upon departure.
• Non-diocesan/private groups, day rate: $50 minimum for five or fewer guests; $10 for each additional guest. Overnight: $30 per person, per night, with a minimum fee of $240 per group. Full payment is due upon departure.
• Rate for diocesan youth events/parish youth groups in the diocese, overnight: $10 per person per night. Full payment is due upon departure.

A $50 deposit is required within 10 business days of making a reservation.

To make your reservation, contact Rosemary Davenport at rdavenport@etdiocese.net. or 865-966-2110.

Grace Point pages on the Web include more facilities information and directions to the camp and retreat center: etdiocese.net/gracepoint/