Last week, the first campers arrived at Camp Blessing in Brenham, Texas, to careen down a zipline, wobble in kayaks, glue objects to construction paper, and strut their stuff in a talent show.
That they came at all was no small feat. Six years ago, the COVID-19 pandemic forced Camp Blessing, which serves children with intellectual, developmental, and physical disabilities, to cancel its summer sessions The virus posed a particularly dire threat to its campers.
Camp Blessing used what director Greg Anderson now calls the “slow season” to retool its programming, cutting back on other events so it could focus more on its core summer offerings. Still, when the camp reopened for the 2021 camp season, it had only about half of its normal camper registrations.
“Because of the population we serve, parents had anxiety about sending compromised children to camp,” Anderson said. This summer, the camp might finally return to pre-pandemic camper numbers.
Running a summer camp is not for the timid. And summer camps for children living with disabilities demand even more of those who operate them. Staff juggle complicated logistics to host kids who may not be able to stand in a tug-of-war line, verbalize questions about a craft, or eat or bathe without help. Where many camps boast of low staff-to-camper ratios, special needs camps operate on a whole other level, often with two to three times more staff than campers.
But directors say all that work pays off because special needs camps minister not only to kids but also to parents and the small armies of volunteers who gather every summer to make it all happen.
“It’s a labor-intensive model, but the beautiful part of that is—at least for us—there is discipleship at every level,” Anderson said.
At Camp Blessing, which will hold nine weeks of camp this summer, about 60 campers arrive each week. But the campers make up only a portion of the camp’s population. Each camper is assigned a buddy for the week, a teenage volunteer. Add to those middle school students working in the dining hall, adults serving as cabin parents, and extensive medical staff. Nearly 180 people live on the grounds on a given day.
Other camps mobilize similarly large volunteer forces. Hope Heals Camp in northern Alabama plans to welcome nearly 3,000 participants this year from around the country and internationally. Roughly half of them are volunteers, the rest campers and their families.
In southwest Missouri, Camp Barnabas expects about 1,600 campers during its nine weeks of sessions. It will need 2,500 volunteers and 200 staff.
At Barnabas, as at other camps for children and adults with special needs, activities resemble those at any summer camp: a rock wall, archery, swimming, canoeing on the lake, and chapel services. But staff can’t simply sit on the sidelines and watch. They actively tweak activities for each camper’s individual abilities.
“We can accommodate and meet campers where they are while also pushing them to try something new,” said camp director Brenda Brandt.
Pulling this all off requires creativity and extra sets of hands to monitor every activity—as well as doctors, several nurses, and additional medical volunteers attuned to the unique needs of each camper.
In Texas, the difficult project of tailoring camp for kids with special needs became even more difficult in the aftermath of last summer’s flood in Hill Country, which left over 130 dead, including 25 campers and 2 counselors at Camp Mystic.
Texas implemented new laws regulating how summer camps prepare for natural disasters and increasing the costs of operating a summer camp. The laws also required youth camps to move overnight cabins out of floodplains and follow weather warnings more closely via radios and alert systems.
As a result, some Texas summer camps will not open this year.
At Camp Blessing, its annual licensing fee—which camps pay the state in order to operate—rose from $450 to $19,500. The camp spent an additional $70,000 updating other safety systems on campus, according to Anderson.
Camp leadership met with lawmakers to explain the burden imposed by other proposed changes, like requiring camps to have redundant internet connections, with at least one fiber-optic line. No fiber-optic lines currently reach Camp Blessing, and Anderson said the price tag for installing one was high. Texas agreed to ease the fiber-optic requirement for 2026.
About 270 miles north of Camp Blessing sits Charis Hills, a camp that ministers to high-functioning children with autism and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.
Charis Hills will host between 30 and 35 campers each week this summer, according to director Dava McDaniel, whose grandparents founded the camp as their “retirement project.” Her grandfather grew up with a prosthetic leg and had experienced from his own childhood how empowering camps can be for the disability community.
But this summer, putting on such a camp was not guaranteed.
McDaniel spent the early part of 2026 attending conferences to learn about the new regulations. Her husband made required upgrades, like installing posts and solar lights along the camp’s emergency route, so they could continue operating.
“Being a summer camp, we are lucky to be in Texas because there are a lot of resources to adapt to the new regulations,” she said. But she noted those resources also imposed their own cost. Traveling to conferences to learn about legislation and the ways other camp directors were adjusting, for example, took time and money.
And still, the new standards have not eliminated parents’ anxiety.
“I’ve heard people say, ‘I would never send my child to summer camp after what happened,’” McDaniel said. “We don’t know the full effects of what this tragedy has stamped on summer camp. But what we do know is that exposure to nature decreases anxiety, and children benefit from spending time with others who are like them.”
Directors say the payoff of camp is not only for kids with disabilities. Families and volunteers often drive away changed by the experience.
That’s part of what motivates Hope Heals Camp, a component of a larger disability ministry founded by Jay and Katherine Wolf.
In 2008, Katherine Wolf suffered a massive stroke. After years of therapy she learned to walk and talk again, but with lingering speech and mobility impairments.
The struggle moved the Wolfs to establish Hope Heals as a ministry to families experiencing disabilities. The couple wanted those families also to have a summer camp made just for them.
Hope Heals Camp welcomed its first campers in 2017 and now runs five camp sessions each summer at Camp McDowell in Nauvoo, Alabama. It’s largely free for the hundreds of campers and their families it pulls from across the country and internationally.
While some of the camp’s volunteers come from church groups, many are families serving together, retired couples, or individuals. About 20 percent of the camp’s volunteers have some form of disability themselves.
“A beautiful trend we’ve seen over the years is camper families returning to volunteer,” Jay Wolf said. “Their camper experience empowered them to see their story differently, then come to camp to serve families like their own.”
Since Hope Heals Camp hosts entire families, many of its campers do not have disabilities. The camp offers programming for many ages and ability levels, from adult options all the way down to nursery facilities.
A key priority for the camp is inviting individuals with disabilities to fully participate in worship services. Each camp week culminates in a worship service where “everyone is welcomed to worship in their own way,” Jay Wolf said. The camp hosts a Luke 14–inspired dinner banquet with dancing and a disco ball.
“Church is not always a place of belonging and welcome for folks with disabilities,” Wolf said. They “have often felt like a problem to be solved by the church rather than people to be known and learned from and loved.”
Chapel services don’t include evangelistic altar calls as they do at many camps, but Wolf said the days are filled with Bible teaching and worship. He said the goal is to create a safe environment where families can be spiritually refreshed.
“Our hope is to create a small representation of what the church could be—an inter-ability community that needs and celebrates every part of the body of Christ,” he said. “And after experiencing our little representation, we pray families will return to their local faith communities.”
Inter-operability is also a feature at Camp Blessing, which doesn’t segregate campers based on their challenges. A camper with high-functioning autism spectrum disorder might be in a cabin with a camper in a wheelchair. The result, Anderson said, is that often campers help and serve each other.
Similar to those serving at Hope Heals Camp, at Camp Blessing those most impacted are often volunteers and family members, Anderson says.
Middle and high school volunteers at Camp Blessing do not have to be believers, but they must be comfortable with the camp’s statement of faith. So when the staff communicates the gospel to campers, they are also sharing it with volunteers.
“We are just as much a ministry to neurotypical middle school and high school students as to the campers,” Anderson said.
That ministry extends to parents, too, for whom the week their children spend horseback riding, swimming, or completing a ropes course might be their only break all year. Anderson knows this firsthand. As the father of a special needs, nonverbal son, he and his wife are primary caregivers. They understand the strain camper parents experience.
“It’s very rare for us to get a break. We want to provide that for these other parents,” he said.
Camp Barnabas in Purdy, Missouri, is evidence that the experiences had at a special needs camp often stick with participants for life.
“We’re in the middle of nowhere,” said marketing director Abby Smith. But that doesn’t deter campers from returning. Some have been attending since the ministry began in 1994. Some campers have been attending longer than some of the staff have been alive.
Barnabas campers are assigned their own dedicated volunteer counselors. Smith said 80 percent of the volunteers are from churches, often youth groups or college ministries, and pay their own way to come and serve. The camp calls them missionaries.
Many of those missionaries catch a vision for disability ministry that they carry back into their non-camp lives. Brandt, the camp’s director, said a week of serving at Camp Barnabas helps ministry leaders see it might just take small changes to make a church feel more welcoming to individuals living with disabilities.
“Churches come to Barnabas to learn about disability ministry, or they leave and go home to start disability ministry,” Brandt said.
Smith cites her own teenage daughters as an example. They had very little experience interacting with people with disabilities before volunteering at camp. But after the week, her daughters were no longer intimidated to serve in the ministry. “At Camp Barnabas, we ask, ‘How can we make a way for people to come to know Jesus and be part of the Camp Barnabas family?’ I see God’s heart in what we do, and we want for churches to be like that too,” Brandt said.
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