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August 2001
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ZipUSA: 07756
By Angus Phillips
People have been sleeping in tents at Ocean Grove, New Jersey, for more than 130 years. The little shore town is just 40 miles south of New York City, so the neighborhood has changed, but the spirit of a rustic summer worship camp endures.
"It's a place where God and country come together, like it used to be in days gone by," said Jeanne Dimmit, who drives from Arizona each summer with her husband, Howard, to relax and pray by the sea. "At night I hook the latch on the screen and say, 'Okay, we're secure.' It's the ultimate act of faith."
Then they sleep, perchance to snore. "One night I woke up and nudged Howard to get him to stop," said Jeanne. "When he rolled over, I realized it wasn't him snoring. It was someone in the tent next door."
If pilgrims are tightly packed in the heart of God's Square Mile, as Ocean Grove is called, they can take comfort in a civil lifestyle that nowadays lures as many tourists as true believers. The modest little Methodist town has become a destination for urban Easterners weary of bright lights, thick smoke, and loud music. They come for weekends where the sea breeze and purr of surf lulls them, where strangers smile and say hello, and where you can walk wherever you need to go.
Just over a hundred tents remain; the waiting list to nail down a lease on one can be seven years or longer. Tenters go to daily gospel sings and services near the century-old Great Auditorium. Others stay in bed-and-breakfasts, inns, and hotels that date from the late 19th century and frequent the beach, ice cream shops, and eateries on Main Avenue.
There are no bars in Ocean Grove; alcohol is not for sale. There are no movie theaters or fast-food shops. There's a stately boardwalk lined with iron streetlamps but nary a business or advertisement on it, save a flyer for the Sunday sermon.
What to do in such a place? I wondered as I wandered on my first morning, bound down tree-lined Pilgrim Pathway toward the heart of town, exchanging "good mornings" with passersby.
I could not get lost though I knew not the way. I just aimed for voices raised in song. "Blessed Assurance" it was, echoing down the street. A Bible group had gathered in a tabernacle, its windows opened wide to the breeze, to study the Epistles. "Isn't singing in the morning wonderful?" the preacher asked before launching his sermon.
Voices have filled the air with sacred song in Ocean Grove since a group led by a bearded, stern-looking Methodist minister, the Reverend William B. Osborn, founded it as a haven of Christian renewal in 1869. He picked the site for the earthliest reason—Ocean Grove has few mosquitoes, and it's hard to pray while whacking bugs.
The insect situation remains blissfully unaltered, but a lot else has changed on the northern New Jersey shore. Population growth, leisure time, and automobiles brought development. Beach towns boomed and some exploded, like Asbury Park next door, whose oceanfront today is a battered shell, scarred by riots and abandoned by commerce.
But modest Ocean Grove, anchored in faith, soldiers on. It's odd, but this town built of the frailest stuff—a scatter of tents, a pine-paneled auditorium big as Noah's Ark, tightly packed cottages and wooden inns as dry as tinder—survives.
The auditorium is the core, an airy 6,500-seat arena erected in 92 working days in 1894, with a huge 10,000-pipe Hope-Jones organ that booms its musical message on Sundays to the tents and beyond.
Virtually every bit of ground in Ocean Grove is owned by the Camp Meeting Association, a group of 26 Methodist ministers and laity. The association leases the land for as little as $10.50 a year per 30-by-60-foot lot, a colossal bargain, and many inns and homes that sprang up a century ago or more still stand, giving the place a Victorian look.
The pleasures are simple. At Nagle's, an 1890 pharmacy turned lunch counter, block-long lines form for ice cream in the evenings, and a sidewalk pianist bangs out show tunes on Saturday nights.
Folks stroll a boardwalk with no concessions, no tattoo parlors, just weathered wood to walk on, silver moonlight on the sea, and the Atlantic's rumbles and whispers to savor. How quiet is Ocean Grove? "Well," a resident told me, "we used to call it Ocean Grave."
That was before state courts ruled in the late 1970s that using police to enforce a religious association's rules was a violation of the Constitution. Till then, laws banned beachgoing on Sunday, among other things.
On January 1, 1980, municipal powers were ceded by the Camp Meeting Association to Neptune Township. Ocean Grove today is more temperate, with a diverse population including many Roman Catholics, the township's Jewish mayor, a lively group of deinstitutionalized ex-mental patients living in a few unrestored inns, and a substantial gay population, including the past president of the chamber of commerce.
"I have a good friend who works as a diversity consultant," said Randy Bishop, the former chamber president. "He says Ocean Grove is the case study of a place where diversity really works."
It's a curious distinction for a town that made a reputation arresting people for sunbathing on Sundays. Perhaps tolerance is the fruit of all those years living cheek by jowl in tents.
That thought struck me while visiting Judy Geitner of Lynchburg, Virginia, one afternoon in the pin-neat canvas tent she and her husband, a former Presbyterian minister, share. They've been coming to Ocean Grove for 38 years. A woman working in her kitchen next door stifled a sneeze. Without thinking, I found myself muttering "Bless you" to a total stranger I couldn't even see.
Maybe, when conditions are right, grace just happens.
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