Treating Kids Like Royality
Alumni Making a Difference
Wayne Tesch '95 founded the nation's leading camp for foster children.
At a sprawling, pine-scented campground near Lake Arrowhead, California, Royal Family Kids Camp is about to give eighty foster kids from Orange County the best week of their year. Royal Family, founded by Wayne Tesch ’95 MA, has become the nation’s leading network of camps for abused children, with 162 camps in the U.S. and six foreign countries. Through Royal Family, Tesch is reaching thousands of hurting children and setting the standard for serving this often-forgotten population.
“It’s the church’s biblical mandate to take care of the poor, needy and brokenhearted,” Tesch says. “God is raising up churches to minister life, healing and hope for kids.”
As two buses full of foster kids pull up, dozens of adult counselors cheer wildly and wave posters bearing the names of each child. Music blares. Each child getting off the bus is announced by name and receives an ovation as if he or she were the most important person in the world. And for this week, they are. “
This is what heaven will be like,” Tesch says, watching the familiar scene unfold. “If you knew the stories of these kids ... They all experienced abuse so great that they had to be removed from their homes. Many of the parents are heavily into drugs, or in prison. Those are traumatic things. Where does a kid go when there’s no mommy and dad’s in prison? For a week some of them go here.”
Tesch was just 12 years old when he first conceived of a camp like this. While attending a church camp in his home state of New York, he says he saw a vision of what God wanted him to do with his life. It included a “collage of children’s faces: black, Hispanic, Asian and Caucasian.” God told him, “I want you to work with these children and minister to them.
” Ten years later, after graduating from Evangel College, Tesch came to California to be Newport-Mesa Christian Center’s director of Christian education. He served there for eighteen years as senior associate pastor and started a long association with Vanguard University. He was VU’s soccer coach in the early 1970s and taught adjunct classes.
He founded Royal Family in 1985 and the first camp drew a multiracial group of 37 kids. At their first meeting Tesch looked over the audience and saw that his vision as a 12-year-old was being fulfilled.
“I still get choked up about that,” he says.
In 1990 the church launched Wayne and wife Diane as full-time missionaries to abused children. Royal Family now has camps in thirtysix states serving 6,500 kids this year. Tesch and his wife run the organization like a franchiser, training each church to uphold high standards and partner with its community for funding and support. He hopes to greatly expand Royal Family’s reach in the next few years.
“We’re growing by 15 to 18 percent a year, and I need to grow it faster,” he says. “I’ve been fishing with a fishing pole, and I’m looking to fish with a net.
” To help Royal Family go to the next level of effectiveness, Tesch enrolled in VU’s graduate program in religion and earned a master’s of theological studies in 1995.
“I needed the understanding and skills of leadership to grow an organization,” he says. “I needed what Vanguard has to offer.” The study and research he conducted at VU “had a profound impact on who we are” as Royal Family, he says. “It was a time of great reflection to understand who I am, what my gifts are. It was a phenomenal experience.” Tesch’s daughter Renee (Schroder) graduated from VU in 1992.
Back at the campground, Tesch hosts an afternoon training session for Royal Family’s directors-in-training. Royal Family has unusually rigorous requirements, requiring six days of training for leaders and ten to twelve hours of training for each counselor before camp, compared with four hours that other camps require. “It’s like a part-time job,” Tesch says. “Thorough training is one of our non-negotiables.”
Royal Family also maintains a very low ratio of one counselor for every two kids, compared to one counselor for every ten kids at other camps. And Royal Family works hard to get counselors to gel as a team. “It’s just as important for the adults to coalesce as it is for the kids to bond,” Tesch says, “and when that happens you have a great camp. God can do more when there’s harmony than when there’s disunity.”
Perhaps above all, Royal Family creates an unusually calm camp environment. Unlike some camps which seem to operate on hype and constant energy, Royal Family encourages peacefulness. The camp is fun, but serene. “It’s a slower pace,” says Tesch. “We walk through the day with the campers rather than run through the day. The Deuteronomy 6 model of ‘walking and talking on the way’ — that’s what makes it work.
The pleasant atmosphere also increases loyalty among Royal Family’s 6,000 volunteers. More than ninety percent of volunteers, drawn from churches around the U.S., return each year, double the national average for camp volunteers. Some Royal Family camps have such little counselor turnover that open spots are coveted. The average Royal Family counselor is around 35 years old, much older than at most camps which rely on younger, less-experienced people.
Later in the afternoon, all over the campground kids and counselors sit under groves of pine trees and make birdhouses, decorate t-shirts and swim in the pool. Tesch strolls through and kneels at the pool’s edge to greet some youngsters. Nearby, Tania Benzinger, a volunteer from Costa Mesa, helps several boys paint t-shirts and Frisbees. Benzinger and her husband have served here for eighteen years. “I look forward to it,” she says. “You see sparkles in their eyes. You see an adult sitting down with them for perhaps the first time and interacting with them, teaching them new things. You see their faces come alive. To me it’s really powerful.”
At another activity station Tesch chats with boys who’ve just caught a lizard to put in the “critter cages” they made. There is pride of accomplishment in their eyes.
Tesch recently attended a Royal Family event in Topeka, and a woman walked up to him and said, “You don’t know who I am, but I attended your camps in 1985, ’86 and ’87 in California. I am happily married, have three children and I do not beat them. At Royal Family I received the hope that life could be better.” Unlike most church camps, Royal Family offers no altar calls or preaching because the children who attend are wards of the state. But the influence of the counselors make a difference in their lives, says Tesch.
Brooke Benda ’98 MA ’00 teaches in VU’s School for Professional Studies and at Concordia University. She volunteers at Royal Family every year as a social worker, and the camp convinced her to change her career to counseling. “You see constant growth and change in the kids,” she says. “Some come up here with their stuff in trash bags because they don’t have luggage. We make them feel that this is their family. It’s an amazing thing. I don’t know what I would do without the camp.”
Royal Family has managed to inspire that kind of enthusiasm in Christians and non- Christians alike. “We have atheists who sponsor kids to go to camp because they say that’s what the church ought to do,” says Tesch. “Most of the donations to Royal Family come from outside the church.”
When the week ends, each child receives a personalized photo album which often becomes their most prized possession. Many abused children lack photos of themselves “because nobody thinks about it,” says Tesch.
At least three former Royal Family campers attend VU, and two are on scholarship. Tesch hopes Royal Family will help more kids attend college in the future. His big vision is to have a 100,000 kids in Royal Family’s camping program — fully twothirds of the U.S. foster care population ages 6-12.
“We’re here to demonstrate God’s love and compassion to them,” he says. “For one week we bless the children, just like Jesus blessed the children. We let them know God has a plan for them. It’s amazing to see the transformation that takes place.”