On a Saturday in May 2024, just a week or so before campers were to arrive for another summer of fun at Camp Bratton-Green, a very different clientele descended on the property. They were young and old, camp kids and newbies, from every corner of the diocese and beyond. A suspicious number of them arrived with barbecue smokers latched to their trailer hitches.

This was the inaugural Culpepper Cookout, an event conceived as part family reunion, part fundraiser, part outreach event to bring new folks to camp. And, of course, an opportunity to do some seriously good eating. A barbecue competition was the centerpiece of the day, and five teams participated in a rib cookoff to be judged by the crowd.

When the (quite literal) smoke cleared and the ballots were tallied, Chapel of the Cross, Madison, took home the grand prize, but not without having to overcome some excellent competition from teams representing St. Mark’s, Gulfport; St. Paul’s, Columbus; Trinity, Natchez; and St. Columb’s, Ridgeland.

Brothers Keating and Kennedy Helms founded Cook Shak BBQ in 2022 to compete in barbecue competitions. They brought their talents out to the cookout to represent St. Mark’s. Obviously, they love barbecue. They also love camp.

“Bratton-Green holds a special place in our hearts,” says Keating Helms. “We grew up attending Family Weekends and can’t wait for our children to experience summer camp there one day! The Culpepper Cookout has reignited our love for CBG. In 30 years of attending, we’ve never had as much fun as we did this past year—great food, great friends, and great worship!”

Adam Gwin and Trinity, Natchez, put a team together just for the cookout and bonded by staying together in a cabin.

“We were able to catch up with old friends on other teams from around the diocese as well as make new ones,” says Gwin. “The weekend was definitely warm but the pool was open so people could cool off and the atmosphere at Gray Center is always so calming that it was a wonderful weekend. We look forward to participating again this year!”

The Rev. Andrew “Pitpastor” McLarty, who represented St. Paul’s, agrees.

“There is a lot of down time cooking BBQ,” he says, “so making friends with the neighbors you are competing with is important. Plus, when BBQ people gather they are going to talk about their previous cooks regardless of whether there is competition afoot or not. It’s in our nature.”

The whole event was a huge success, far surpassing the wildest dreams of its organizers.

“We really set our expectations low,” says event organizer and former CBG permanent staffer Audrey Feeney Ford. “We were trying not to go too big, too hard at the beginning. We set ourselves a goal to raise $5,000 and maybe have 100 people there, and we ended up with over 200 people and raising $15,000.”

Despite having a background in event planning, Ford was anxious in the lead-up to the cookout because of how important camp is to her. When the day finally arrived, she was able to breathe a sigh of relief.

“I was nervous heading up to the event—I thought, oh my gosh, are we going to pull this off? This is crazy. But I was almost emotional the day of, when we saw what money we were making. I thought, ‘this is so exciting.’”

Ford’s husband Graham, whom she met at camp, helped cook pulled pork to supplement the competition ribs and make sure everyone had plenty to eat. The couple, who have two young children, feel an obligation to make sure camp is around for generations to come.

“I grew up at camp,” says Ford, “and now that I’m having kids, I feel like it’s my duty to become involved and give back to that space so that I can bring my children there. And while I personally don’t have $15,000 to give, I can give my time and energy to this function to help with that. I just felt very proud and almost emotional, because I felt like we’re building this for the future.”

The genesis of the Culpepper Cookout was a conversation in summer 2023 between the Fords; the Rev. Chris Robinson of Redeemer, Biloxi; and John Jordan and Mary Langford Proctor (another camp-born marriage). Recalling the fun of the long-defunct Bishop’s Barbecue, they started dreaming of a similar event that would encourage new people to visit camp and help bring in extra money to fund programs and improvements to the facilities. This felt especially salient given that, just the year before, a mad dash had taken place to get camp ready for occupancy again after neglect during the COVID pandemic.

Robinson had the idea to name the event for the Rev. Chuck Culpepper. Culpepper died unexpectedly in the summer of 2019 at the age of 69, just days after returning home from co-directing Middler camp (for kids in roughly 5th & 6th grades). When his co-director from that summer, Clinton Junior High School teacher and former permanent staffer Jason Woodcock, heard the name idea, he thought it was perfect.

“Chuck’s love for and impact on Bratton-Green was unbelievable,” says Woodcock. “Most ‘camp people’ consider him the very embodiment of what camp at its best is all about. Even at 69, he was the most youthful person in any room he walked into.”

Culpepper’s ashes were scattered in camp’s Rose Hill Lake at his memorial service, and his spirit was certainly felt at the gathering bearing his name last summer. Children ran around through the covered walkways of the campus while their parents and grandparents swapped stories about camp as it was a decade ago… or five decades ago.

Ford and her team have already been hard at work for a couple of months organizing the second edition of the cookout, to be held Saturday, May 24th. They plan to add more activities, increase the field of barbecue teams, and continue to grow the event (already, the cooking area has been moved from the smaller kitchen parking lot to camp’s main, much larger, parking lot to accommodate growth). For this group of camp veterans, it’s a project well worth the effort.

“We’ve got this whole generation of camp folks in our 30s and 40s that are really trying here,” says Ford. “We’re also trying to have our own jobs and families and lives, but we really want this place to survive, so we’re saying to everyone, ‘hey, look over here!’ Because camp is really, really special.”