ERBC’s Core Values: God Matters
Throughout our newsletters in 2025, we want to highlight some of Echo Ranch’s basic operating principles. In any organization, fully committed teams can get so caught up in what they’re doing that they forget – or never even work out in the first place – why exactly they’re doing it, and how their mission and beliefs should inform the way they do it. With the endless jobs and many moving pieces at Echo Ranch, we know that if we’re not careful, our team could be susceptible to this sort of value amnesia. That’s why, as you may have noticed, we proudly herald our mission statement – Echo Ranch Bible Camp exists to echo God’s glory by building the body of Christ through Christian camping and in partnership with the church – just about everywhere we can (including at the bottom of this newsletter). But our mission statement isn’t our only guiding principle.
Our core values are essentially the next layer of ideology below our mission statement that determines how we work, interact, and make decisions at Echo Ranch. To oversimplify it quite a bit, if our mission statement tells us why we do our jobs, our core values tell us how we should do our jobs. If you’ve visited Echo Ranch and had a hot beverage in our dining hall, or seen a staff member walking around on a Monday, you’ve no doubt noticed our four core values prominently displayed on our mugs and t-shirts: God Matters, People Matter, Team Matters, and Ministry Matters. Did you stop to wonder what exactly those phrases mean? We want to unpack them a bit for you to give you some more insight into ERBC’s guiding philosophy, starting with the first, God Matters.
The placement of this core value as first in the list is intentional, because it’s the most important. In everything we do at Echo Ranch, we want it to be clear that God matters above all. It might seem at first that such a simple statement should go without saying in a Christian ministry. After all, hopefully no one who works or volunteers with us would ever object that they don’t think God matters. But when it comes to how we function practically – for Christians everywhere, not just us here at camp – it’s all too easy to drift into a pattern of relegating God to the sidelines. “Of course we’re doing all this stuff for God! (...He’s just not really necessary for us to get all of it done.)” We can start to view God as just the board chair that we’re trying to please with our work, but who isn’t really involved in our day-to-day jobs. If we end up with this mindset, we’ve gone wrong somewhere. The core value of God Matters is meant to keep us from this error.
Our ultimate goal at ERBC is to please and glorify God, but when we say that God Matters, we mean that and more. The word “matters” in each of our core values has the sense of not just “to be significant,” but also “to influence,” “to direct.” For example, if you hear a man say of his wife, “Her opinion really matters to me,” he doesn’t just mean that he thinks his wife’s opinion is great and important in an abstract way; he means that her opinion shapes what he does, and all his decisions are informed by considering what his wife would think. That’s the sense in which God Matters to ERBC. From the biggest of our big-picture objectives to the smallest of everyday decisions, our goal is to have what we do shaped by what God wants, by what He says is good and right and necessary.
What does that look like in practice? It looks like frequently praying together as a team, bringing our needs and ideas before God and depending on Him for provision and guidance. It looks like prioritizing devotional time in God’s Word, both personally and corporately, to keep renewing our minds by God’s instruction and reminding ourselves of who He is and what He has done for us. Because God matters, we seek to do our jobs, whatever they look like, with heart attitudes that please Him: joy, humility, compassion, and justice. Most of all, we reflect that God Matters when we make the Gospel – the good news that while we were still sinners, Christ died to bear the penalty for our sins and give us his righteousness, and rose again that we might experience new spiritual life today and new eternal life someday – central to everything that we do. It’s both the message that we hope to share with all our campers and guests, and the message that we need to share with each other constantly, so we don’t drift away from it.
The good news of God’s undeserved and unending love promised to us for free in the Gospel is the entire reason that Echo Ranch exists, and every good thing at camp and beyond is just a small reflection of His goodness. Therefore, it makes sense that every decision we make on our team should start with considering that God Matters, so that its end can be echoing God’s glory.