Through the years at Camas High School (CHS), there have been a few different clubs that offer students a chance to find others with the same or similar religious identities. There has been a Jewish club at CHS in addition to a Muslim club that has now been transformed into a club focused on geography and is now called the South Asian Student Association (SASA). 

One club has continued to take hold at CHS and that is the Christian Students United Club (CSU), advised by teacher Valerie Parbon, and it has just been reactivated by interested students.

“This year we had a real significant group that wanted to reactivate [CSU]… since it was already pre-existing,” Parbon said.

In previous years, due to the pandemic, the club had not been able to run because of the lack of interest and the struggle to find an advisor to run the club.

This year students stepped up and reactivated the club with the help of Parbon and got the club fully back up and running. These students are Grace Webberely and Amanda Livingston, both freshmen at CHS. 

“It [is] beneficial to have a club like this at our school because [there is a large population of Christians] but there wasn’t any commonplace to connect with them,” Livingston said.

Webberley had similar feelings to Livingston wanting to have this ability to connect with other Christian students throughout school. 

“We want to be able to see all the other Christians in the hallways and see that person is a Christian like me,” Webberley said.

Currently, the club has started to get its footing and is sorting out what to do with their meetings. As of now, there is a passage that is read at each Thursday meeting and the group talks over it together and decides how it can be related to their own lives. 

The club’s focus has been shifting to become more of a hangout for fellow Christians to get to know one another rather than just a biblical study group. They want to incorporate God into their lives but do not have to stick to only reading a passage to do so. 

These two have found this club incredibly beneficial to their own lives and that it has greatly affected their peers as well in a positive way. 

Athletic Director and Associated Student Body Advisor Stephen Baranowski said that if any students wanted to create their own club relating to anything including religion they just had to step up and say something about it. It only takes one person to create this sort of club and to grow a community that they want to be a part of and that is shown in the lives of these girls.