At the stroke of 9 a.m. on a Monday morning, 575 elementary school-aged children flooded the doors of Minooka Bible Church for a week of what was called Bible camp on steroids. As each child walked into their designated room, a long line of teenage leaders yelled, cheered and offered high fives to welcome them to ground zero for the daily hour-long opening celebration.
Lead Pastor Arol McFadden said each year the pastoral team comes up with a new theme in order to communicate a Biblical truth in a fun manner. This year, the verses studied were from Ephesians 6 and the message was “how to fight fooey, lies, the enemy, the devil, throws at them and all through the lens of putting on the armor of God.”
In 2000, McFadden had the title of youth leader and the Christian Education department wanted to host a day camp. McFadden said he thought the church could pay high school students to be on staff like a typical day camp. After some thought, he decided the church could not pay the students enough to make it worthwhile, so he took a different approach.
“Instead of a paid camp, I decided to have it be a local mission trip. We set it up so the high school staff could pretend as if they were hundreds of miles away and this was home base,” McFadden said.
With that idea, the high school students were the leaders of the campers and would sleep and eat all week at the church as if they were away on a mission trip.
At that time the movie “Spy Kids” was popular, so McFadden and the team decided the name for the one-time day camp was Spy Kidz and they moved forward with not only a place to learn about the gospel, but to have fun.
“When I was a kid, I loved vacation bible study. We would go in the morning, have lunch but on the way home my craft would fall apart and it felt like every other weekend at my church. When my parents took me to Disneyland, I saw the rides, lights, sound effects and color — they did an amazing job to capture my attention,” McFadden said.
With that background he and the staff made Spy Kidz a place where the campers walked into a church transformed into an exciting place which looked nothing like the weekend church to capture attention and reveal teachings of the Bible.
McFadden had the intention of Spy Kidz being a one and done day camp. Eighteen years later the camp has grown from 72 campers to 575 campers in 2018.
McFadden’s wife, Julie McFadden, ran the logistics team, which began to put together the events, both off and on campus, in January and once final numbers came in, the multi-faceted schedule with 30 minute event changes over the seven hour day gets created by Kerri Furhman.
Campers grouped by age into kindergarten and first, second and third, and fourth and fifth, with its own schedule of events. Monday inflatables and the Pro Kids Show with Tim Hannig took the main stage. Tuesday, the Chicago Boyz Tumblers wowed the campers with stunts and McFadden and Pastor of Children’s Ministries Josh Koehler created an obstacle course with a Bible verse puzzle at the end. The favorite part was the fooey, would squirt water at the campers.One of the favorites each year included the spy visits.
The rest of the week lent itself to trips to Morris City Pool, Channahon Lanes, Family Fun Zone, Skyzone, the Mar movie theatre and Haunted Trails.
The spy visits were adult volunteers who transformed themselves into characters of Fooey Fighter agents. Each agent had told messages which correlated with the theme as well as a Bible truth.
“My favorite part were the spy visits because I learned so much like it’s not okay to lie and even though some things are hard, you are going to make it through everything,” camper Bella Sherman said.
The 110 high school leaders were not the only student helpers the past week, 97 active junior high ministry students from 6- 8 grades, under direction of Junior High Pastor Nick Dertinger.