Some children look forward to summer camp solely to escape a rigid school routine and kick back with their friends, but when Keith Oglesby was younger, he decided to make Christian camp his whole life.
Now, as a professor in Christian Leadership and Church Ministries and the director of the Camp and Outdoor Adventure Leadership (COAL) program at Liberty University, Oglesby is living out his love for camp ministry through his day-to-day work.
Oglesby grew up in camp long before he could officially attend, as his father was a camp director. Even at a young age, he said he could see great change in people’s lives from being at camp. At 9 years old, he did a career project in school on Christian camping.
“I love the skits, the recreation; I love the college students,” Oglesby said. “Like, I literally just fell in love with the environment, the atmosphere. But really, most importantly, the spiritual component of just watching the kids get reconnected with Christ.”
After he served at Kanakuk Christian Camps in college, he started his very own camp from scratch: Carolina Creek Christian Camps located in Houston, Texas. As he recruited students from over 40 college campuses to contribute to his camp, he saw something unique in the students at Liberty: their love for serving and sharing the gospel.
“And so selfishly, I mean, we would try to hire every Liberty student that we possibly could,” Oglesby said. “They were amazing.”
In 2015, Liberty recruited Oglesby to develop the handful of outdoor and discipleship classes it had at the time. Today, those classes have grown into the COAL degree: a full-fledged bachelor’s degree program with board and site development, fundraising and programming.
“(This program has) really every adventure side, every administrative side, and every budget side that you need to know,” Oglesby said. “We want people to have a career.”
Oglesby compared choosing his favorite part of COAL to picking a favorite child: simply impossible.
He also highlighted the program’s ability in teaching facilitation and developing a culture of serving, believing that facilitating conversations in groups is a skill a lot of people want but do not have.
“In camp ministry, at the core we are meeting the needs of people in this outdoor, incredible creation where they can hear from God,” Oglesby said. “… we’re facilitating an encounter for them with the God of the universe. And that really comes through serving.”
When he isn’t teaching, meeting with students or commuting from his home in Dallas to Lynchburg, Oglesby can be found consulting with camps nationally and internationally, writing his first book, “Live Your Purpose: A Three Step Model,” or compiling a list of games for his upcoming book, “Games with Purpose, Volume Two” set to be published this April and available to purchase on Amazon. His first games book, “Games with Purpose, Volume One.”
“Live Your Purpose: A Three Step Model” and “Games with Purpose, Volume One” have both been Amazon bestsellers.
After getting many requests to teach games for groups ranging from 20 to 500 people at multiple seminars, Oglesby thought it was time for his ideas to be penned down.
“It wasn’t intentional, really, it was just a small part of what I was doing,” Oglesby said. “But it’s one of the things that people need the most. I think there’s not a lot of game training out there.”
He plans to release a new volume annually in the upcoming years. Each volume will cover how to play 50 games and how each relates to the gospel. He said that the games come easily to him through witnessing people’s interactions or are even inspired by reading Scripture.
“Sometimes it’s a spiritual point that leads to a game,” Oglesby said. “Sometimes it’s a game that leads to a spiritual point.”
Another component of COAL is mission trips. LU Serve partnered with Blue Sky Global and three Kenyan churches in November 2025 to take 11 students and two leaders to Nairobi, Kenya. Over Thanksgiving break, this 10-day trip allowed Liberty students to lead and participate in activities, games, worship, small groups and sharing the gospel with the children, ages 9 to 17. On the trip, over 37 campers made the first-time decision to be followers of Jesus in one-on-one follow-up discussions.
“Everywhere that we go, we’re there missionally,” Oglesby said. “We’re there to share the incredible news of the gospel with a wide range of different populations.”
Although the COAL program is thriving, Oglesby is not finished in developing it. He wants the program to teach the best practices of spiritual leadership, hospitality, property management and financial stewardship. Most importantly, COAL should aid students in discovering what the best practices are to meet the needs of others.
“I want us to be producing the highest caliber of trained people, where people all over the world are calling Liberty University and saying, ‘we need a COAL major to come direct our camp,’” Oglesby said.
The aim is not just to grow the COAL program, but also to invest in people’s lives through their training.
“We all need growth,” Oglesby said. “We all need … affirmation, but we also need accountability. So, I just think discipleship isn’t something you just teach, it’s something you do.”
Atkinson is a feature reporter for the Liberty Champion.