thumb|400px|A service of worship at the [[tabernacle (Methodist)|tabernacle of a camp meeting of the Allegheny Wesleyan Methodist Connection, held at Wesleyan Methodist Camp in Stoneboro, Pennsylvania, US.]]
The camp meeting is a form of Protestant Christian religious service originating in England and Scotland as an evangelical event in association with the communion season. It was held for worship, preaching and communion on the American frontier during the Second Great Awakening of the early 19th century. Revivals and camp meetings continued to be held by various denominations, and in some areas of the mid-Atlantic in the US, led to the development of seasonal cottages for meetings.
Originally camp meetings were held in frontier areas, where people without regular preachers would travel on occasion from a large region to a particular site to camp, pray, sing hymns, and listen to itinerant preachers at the tabernacle. Camp meetings offered community, often singing and other music, sometimes dancing, and diversion from work. The practice was a major component of the Second Great Awakening, an evangelical movement promoted by Baptist, Methodist, Presbyterian and other preachers in the early 19th century. Certain denominations took the lead in different geographic areas.
As with brush arbor revivals and tent revivals, camp meetings today are often held annually at campgrounds owned by a Christian denomination.
Background
The camp meeting is a phenomenon of
British Christianity and American frontier Christianity. It has strong roots in traditional practices of the Presbyterian Church in Scotland. Scots and Scots-Irish immigrants brought their familiar Presbyterian communion season practices with them to the US. Barton W. Stone and Alexander Campbell, two leading ministers of the later Restoration Movement of the 1830s, had each been ordained as Presbyterian ministers and served for several years in that role, leading preaching at numerous meetings.
The movement of thousands of settlers to new territories without permanent villages of the types they knew meant they were without religious communities. Not only were there few authorized houses of worship, there were fewer ordained ministers to fill the pulpits. The "camp meeting" led by itinerant preachers was an innovative response to this situation. Word of mouth told there was to be a religious meeting at a certain location. Due to the primitive means of transportation, if the meeting was to be more than a few miles' distance from the homes of those attending, they would need to stay at the revival for its entire duration, or as long as they desired to remain. People generally camped out at or near the revival site, as on the frontier there were usually neither adequate accommodations nor the funds for frontier families to use them. People were attracted to large camp meetings from a wide area. Some came out of sincere religious devotion or interest, others out of curiosity and a desire for a break from the arduous frontier routine; the structure of the situation often resulted in new converts.
thumb|An [[engraving of a Methodist camp meeting in 1819 (US Library of Congress).]]
Freed from daily routines for the duration of the meeting, participants could take part in almost continuous services, which resulted in high emotions; once one speaker was finished (often after several hours), another would often rise to take his place.
Lee Sandlin gave an overview of the typical camp meeting in frontier America:
Sandlin's commentary is a provocative opinion piece compared to the less sensationalist descriptions by those better qualified to write about the event, such as Colonel Robert Patterson, who had been involved in the settlement of Kentucky practically from the beginning. He had described with amazement the religious phenomena taking place during the sequence of meetings. His description of the Cane Ridge Revival, taken from a letter to the Rev. Doctor John King on September 25, 1801, is memorable:
Patterson tried, "as well as I am able", to describe the emotion.
Patterson went on to describe other manifestations which lasted from "one hour to 24", and continued:
Revivalism had been a significant force in religion since the 1740s and the First Great Awakening, but in the days of the camp meeting, "revivalism became the dominant religious culture." In 1875 at the urging of prominent clergy and members, the camp meeting became interdenominational through the formation of the Hollow Rock Holiness Camp Meeting Association and its leasing and eventual purchase of the land. The association, which still operates the camp, notes that it is the oldest Christian camp meeting in continual existence in the United States, being supported by various denominations in the Wesleyan-Holiness tradition. Other sites of Methodist camp meetings in North Carolina are the Chapel Hill Church Tabernacle, Center Arbor, and Pleasant Grove Camp Meeting Ground (1830).
Music and hymn singing
The camp meeting tradition fostered a tradition of music and hymn singing with strong oral, improvisatory, and spontaneous elements.
Hymns were taught and learned by rote, and a spontaneous and improvisatory element was prized. Both tunes and words were created, changed, and adapted in true folk music fashion:
<blockquote>Specialists in nineteenth-century American religious history describe camp meeting music as the creative product of participants who, when seized by the spirit of a particular sermon or prayer, would take lines from a preacher's text as a point of departure for a short, simple melody. The melody was either borrowed from a preexisting tune or made up on the spot. The line would be sung repeatedly, changing slightly each time, and shaped gradually into a stanza that could be learned easily by others and memorized quickly.</blockquote>
<blockquote>Spontaneous song became a marked characteristic of the camp meetings. Rough and irregular couplets or stanzas were concocted out of Scripture phrases and every-day speech, with liberal interspersing of Hallelujahs and refrains. Such ejaculatory hymns were frequently started by an excited auditor during the preaching, and taken up by the throng, until the meeting dissolved into a "singing-ecstasy" culminating in general hand-shaking. Sometimes they were given forth by a preacher, who had a sense of rhythm, under the excitement of his preaching and the agitation of his audience. Hymns were also composed more deliberately out of meeting, and taught to the people or lined out from the pulpit.</blockquote>
Collections of camp meeting hymns were published, which served both to propagate tunes and texts that were commonly used, and to document the most commonly sung tunes and texts. The Camp-meeting Chorister (1830) and The Golden Harp (1857)
Many of these songs were republished in shape note songbooks such as A Supplement to the Kentucky Harmony (1820), the Sacred Harp (1844), and dozens of other publications; they can typically be distinguished by the reuse and re-arrangement of certain lines of lyrics from other songs, re-set to a new melody and sometimes containing new lyrics. Many of these camp songs are also set in a "call and response" format, typically, every line of lyric is followed by the words "Glory Hallelujah!" (although this varies, and other phrases or combinations can be used as well), which allows for easy audience participation in their original format, as the audience can call back the response even if they do not know the lyrics of the song itself. For example, the tune "Antioch 277" from the Sacred Harp reads:
<blockquote><poem>I know that my Redeemer lives, Glory, Hallelujah!
What comfort this sweet sentence gives, Glory Hallelujah!
Shout on, pray on, we're gaining ground, Glory Hallelujah!
The dead's alive and the lost is found, Glory Hallelujah!
(F.C. Wood, 1850)</poem></blockquote>
The 20th-century American composer Charles Ives used the camp meeting phenomenon as a metaphysical basis for his Symphony No. 3 (Ives). He incorporated hymn tunes and American Civil War-era popular songs (which are closely related to camp meeting songs) as part of the symphony's musical material. The piece was not premiered until 1946, almost 40 years after its composition, and the symphony was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1947.
Practice by denomination
Anabaptism
The Dunkard Brethren Church, a denomination of Conservative Anabaptist Christianity, holds its annual camp meeting at Roxbury Holiness Camp.
Methodism
thumb|The [[tabernacle (Methodist)|tabernacle of Pleasant Grove Camp Meeting Ground, owned by the United Methodist Church.]]
Francis Asbury, the first bishop of the American Methodist Episcopal Church, was a staunch supporter of camp meetings. At Methodist camp meetings, which continue to occur today: