You drive north out of Gallant and the road climbs. Chandler Mountain sits off to one side, and somewhere along the way the Methodists own everything, around 1,400 acres of it, bought in 1948 because it was beautiful and because it sat in the geographic middle of the North Alabama Conference. A place everybody could get to.
Bishop Marvin Franklin gave it the name. He said Sumatanga was a Himalayan word that meant "a place of rest and vision." Two years later, Earl McBee and David Hutto wrote it into a conference resolution and stretched the definition out into something you could almost stand on:
"A place low enough for all who have a mind to climb to reach its heights, and yet high enough for all to catch a vision of higher heights."
That's the kind of sentence Methodists write. Earnest, a little overbuilt, and true anyway.
I know the place from the clergy side of it, which is not the postcard side.
For years I went to Camp Sumatanga the way pastors go, on the conference's dime, for continuing education, for sermon-planning retreats, for the trainings you have to sit through to stay ordained and in good standing. Clergy Integrity. Boundaries. The word retreat on the flyer, and then a molded plastic chair and a binder and a room that ran cold.
The retreat center. August 2018.
In August 2018 I drove up for a sermon-planning retreat. They'd left my key at the front desk, retreat center room 202, my name on it. Ninety-six dollars for the room, Friday dinner through Saturday lunch. Dinner at six, breakfast at eight, lunch at noon, and your session had to end by 12:30 so you could get to the dining hall before they shut it down. I remember that more than I remember the sermon I went there to plan.
The year before, September 2017, I went for a retreat called Manna and Mercy, two days walking the whole Bible from Genesis to Revelation through the lens of Jesus. A South African pastor built the thing. We stayed in Eva Walker Lodge, a hundred and sixty-nine dollars all in, and the point of it was to stop reading Scripture as a weapon. To read it as bread instead. I've carried that framing into everything I've preached since. I didn't expect to get it at a Methodist camp in St. Clair County, but that's where it found me.
"To read it as bread instead."
The other thing I did there was garden, or try to.
In 2017 the Board of Ordained Ministry's operational team, the group I sat on, birthed an idea for a volunteer-run garden on the Sumatanga grounds. Farm to table, food grown by whoever showed up, feeding the camp and the people around it. They put out a call for volunteers. I was years away from the flower farm then and didn't know it yet, but I can look back now and see the shape of it starting, the same pull toward soil and provision that ended up defining the rest of my life. It started, in part, on a mountain the church bought in 1948.
The grove. There's a bench for whoever needs it.
Everybody who goes to Sumatanga ends up on top of the mountain eventually, at the chapel.
It's open on every side, stone pillars, a steep tin A-frame roof, a cross at the peak and another cross set on a pedestal at the far end where the wall would be if there were a wall. There isn't. There's just the gable opening onto the whole valley, so that when you stand inside it the view is the altar. Rest low enough to reach. Vision high enough to catch. The people who named the place were describing this exact spot before it was built.
The Chapel on the Mountain. 2016.
Down the hill there's a smaller marker, easy to walk past, a bronze plaque for the Creel Memorial Chapel, put up in 1984 for Judge E. M. Creel, "long time chairman of the Camp and Assembly Commission, a friend of youth." That's how a place like this gets built and kept: a picnic of five hundred people in 1948, a judge who chaired a commission for decades, a garden nobody got paid for, a fundraising campaign in the late 2000s that pulled in over a million and a third dollars at the last minute to keep the doors open. In April 2026 they announced they'd retired the last of the debt and started an endowment. Ninety years of people deciding the mountain was worth keeping.
I don't pastor a Methodist church anymore. I plant flowers on the Headley Flower Farm now, and I gather people a different way through Ecclesia. But the two things Sumatanga taught me are still the two things I do: work the ground, and climb high enough to see. It turns out those were never separate. I ran the Chief Ladiga Trail for years thinking a person had to choose between the valley and the height. The chapel on that mountain in Gallant is built to say you don't.
A place low enough for anyone with a mind to climb. That was the whole idea. It still is.
Camp Sumatanga (Sumatanga Camp & Conference Center) sits north of Ashville and south of Gallant in St. Clair County, Alabama, on roughly 1,400 acres owned by the North Alabama Conference of the United Methodist Church. Land purchased 1948 · first youth conference 1951 · sumatanga.org
Responses