Stone Ministry Visionary: Peter Seirup

I grew up in northern Westchester County, New York with four siblings in a family that enjoyed tent camping. We camped up and down the East Coast in our station wagon with the fondness for the Jersey shore and Florida. 

We also had a seasonal site at a campground in the northern Catskills starting in the 70’s. Later, my younger brother Andrew took a seasonal campsite there for his family.. The closing of that campground left Andrew, my mom and my dad without a camping home, which led to the development of the RV sites at Kingswood which Maria Pia and I now enjoy.

As a little boy I was always fascinated by carpentry. My vocation began when I was  barely a teenager.  I was hired by a would-be mentor to work with his son helping flip houses. That job evolved into my own flipping of houses starting as a late teenager, and then a career as a civil engineer, specializing in the structural aspects of single family construction.  Over the years, always working on the house I currently lived in, I grew to like stone masonry as much if not more than carpentry.

Our kids were at Kingswood long before we were. During the 1990’s all my kids and some nieces and nephews joined “Granddad“ up at Kingwood for Woodsmoke.  Maria Pia and I can’t actually remember visiting the place until the late 90’s because Granddad always drove the kids up and back!

Around 1998  I was actually up at Kingswood picking up our middle son, Gordon, from Woodsmoke. (Gordon is the one who designed and fabricated the loveseat on the Oasis porch that has “Woodsmoke Kingswood 2000“ routed into its back.) During that trip, I was standing in the driveway of Eagle 1 looking at a stone wall when a vision came upon me: a ministry where campers would cement stones into a slowly evolving structure.  That vision stuck with me and grew for about five years before I was moved to present a proposal to the Kingswood Site Committee.

During the quarter century since that time, the Stone Ministry’s ongoing experience has become my primary passion. In recent decades, I have shared my non-paid time between helping to lead various volunteer construction ministries, including the Appalachia Service Project and the Spirit Builders, a ministry of our church. The Spirit Builders construct about 1/3 of a mile worth of wheelchair ramps each year in our community.

Stone Ministry is clearly my favorite, all facets of it. The original idea provides campers the opportunity to cement into our “timeless, evolving structure“ their chosen personal stone anchor into the Kingswood community and God’s love in general. I am thrilled to participate with campers each year, some over and over again and many groups are multigenerational.  The community evolution is heartwarming. The “Stone Ministry Enthusiasts“ that come for off-season weekends to build the roof superstructure, above the stone columns and arches, has grown in numbers over the years and is a very special fellowship group.

I enjoy praying year-round to receive the latest design inspiration for our chapel. If it is not “cast in stone“ yet, then none of us are really sure what the next step will look like. The vision is continually updated. I feel so blessed to be at the center of that.

But the vision doesn’t always come to me alone. I learned many years ago, the Holy Spirit reveals to different people pieces of the puzzle. This is just another example of why community is so important. The evolution of the Stone Ministry and its building is a community adventure. At the core of both the ministry and the building Is a strength and beauty that comes from the diversity of the people and the stones

Now, pretty much retired and numb on my left side, I can finally spend nearly all of the summer up at camp puttering with my passion. The current vision has about 15 years of construction to go. I feel blessed beyond words to carry on as long as God allows.