In Training to Combat Satan

KELSO, Tenn. -- "What's this?" roared Henry Phillips. "There's trash on the floor in here."

Inside the simple block cabin, teenage girls stood at attention at the ends of their bunks, each bed neatly made up with a Bible and study notebook on top of the pillow.

Trash cluttered the entryway to the little cabin; Phillips, "sergeant major" to the campers, had just dumped over the trash can, spilling crumpled paper towels and cups onto the freshly swept floor.

"There's to be no trash in the cabins whatsoever!" Phillips shouted, his voice ragged from a week as drill sergeant at Spiritual Warfare Camp. "And no trash in your hearts. Do you have the message?"

"Yes, sergeant major," the girls answered in chorus, their eyes focused straight ahead as he marched up and down the line.

Inspections at the weeklong camp, designed to toughen bodies and souls, were just one of the rough parts. If you pass the camp general, Pastor Lou Ostrzicki of Bethlehem Baptist Church in Hazel Green, Ala., and forget to salute, you will be on the ground doing push-ups. Make a wrong remark, and you might have a dog biscuit pushed into your mouth.

Unlike North Dakota's Kids on Fire School of Ministry, the subject of the 2006 documentary "Jesus Camp," Spiritual Warfare Camp concentrates on children's spiritual, mental and physical fitness, not on their political actions. The services at Spiritual Warfare Camp are lively, but they don't tip into the charismatic speaking in tongues as did the North Dakota camp, now on hiatus.

Each day at Spiritual Warfare Camp began with a half-hour of physical training and a run, then another half-hour of prayer done while marching.

One squad of boys spent a day wearing diapers over their jeans after the boys whined about push-ups. At this camp, there are no excuses, no whining and no let-up.

What matters in life, Phillips told the kids, is not what happens to you but how you deal with it. Abuse comes because life isn't fair. That's what Satan does to Christians, no matter how hard they try, the camp leaders say.

The kids were met the first day with the command to walk through the pool with their clothes on and then roll in the dirt. The first morning's inspection was like an act of vandalism.

"The first day, we tore everything out of there," Phillips said as he and the camp officers headed to the next cabin. "There's a little bit of edge here."